Art by NW: Tininha Silva’s sculptures look like they washed ashore

“I felt the urge to go 3D,” Silva recalls. “What if I create a sculpture? What if … it comes out of the wall?” she wondered. “People will have more of this feeling that it’s alive and it’s in motion.” 

Enter chicken wire. Silva describes the common poultry fencing as a “portable loom,” which she uses for the base of her amoebic sculptures. This humble material needs some adapting, as the honeycomb is a bit too regimented for her creative visions. 

Accordingly, Silva snips the wires here and there, exploding the hexagons into larger, less-refined holes. She then tightly wraps the metal in raffia, masking tape, natural fibers, seaweed and other beach ephemera, adding the occasional glint of black sequins or an orange puff of fabric.

“Leaving the loom feels very liberating,” Silva says. 

She works intuitively, never sketching beforehand. The resulting artworks look as if they might’ve floated in with the tide. After spending an afternoon surrounded by her sculptures you might get the sense, on your next trip to the beach, that the shoreline detritus is imitating her work.

In a recent group show at Northwind Art Gallery in downtown Port Townsend, Silva exhibited 11 pieces that show a coming-together of environmental influences old and new. Her color palette combines the green-blue-browns of the Northwest coast with the bright blue and bronze shades of her home country. 

Inspired by recent visits to Brazilian beaches, Silva has started using encaustic, a wax-layering technique, to mimic the splash of sea foam. And she’s started adding white sand to the mix to resemble the hard crust of coral.