Blake Prol Barbosa - MFA Fine Art
What carries on
Blake Prol Barbosa’s practice engages with slow craft as an act of resistance. Through printmaking, textile work, painting, and the construction of handmade supports, they emphasise labour, duration, and materiality in defiance of contemporary culture’s acceleration and disposability. Nothing is outsourced or ready-made; every element is built by hand, reclaiming processes often deemed obsolete and repositioning them as strategies of care, attention, and presence.
This commitment to slowness becomes a means of queer worldbuilding. Barbosa constructs spaces where identities and stories outside binary frameworks are not peripheral but central, creating conditions of visibility, belonging, and sacredness. The time-intensive nature of their practice mirrors the deliberate, ongoing act of reshaping one’s place in the world.
Christian iconography serves as both material and tension within the practice. Returning to inherited symbols of faith that historically excluded them, Barbosa reimagines these forms—crosses, saints, rituals—through a queer lens. These motifs are not dismantled but reconfigured, shifting from instruments of restriction to vessels of transformation, solidarity, and beauty.
Barbosa’s practice ultimately situates itself at the intersection of craft, queerness, and spirituality, asking how fractured inheritances might be remade into fertile ground. Through this synthesis, making itself becomes a devotional act: a site where contradiction holds grace and where resistance and reverence coexist.
