Dona Romana de Tocantins: uma fantástica iconografia

Abstract

I would like to introduce my Masters degree s search about Dona Romana s life and her fantastic, predominantly sculptural, work. Afro-descendent clairvoyant and naïf artist, she was born in 1941 and started to have visions and to experience paranormal phenomena since forty years ago. She lives in the state of Tocantins, in the town of Natividade, where hundreds of sculptures, drawings and some mural paintings can be appreciated. Most of her authentic acquis, created during thirty years, has huge sculptural pieces (some of them reaching almost twenty six feet high) and are built on stone, cement, sand and decorated with little pieces of mirror. Dona Romana s art is very peculiar and very different from other brazilian popular artistic expressions, according to one fundamental point: her work is not made for marketing, but created as an urgent interior need. According to her, the images or appearances don t go away until they are not physically built. Her total work remains in her plot where the sculptures are created and kept because, as she sais, they are located on specific geographical points, determined by her mentors (beings that only she can see or hear). Her iconography includes mythological beings, animals, crosses, archers, angels, guardians, murals with indecipherable signups and some antennas , wire air sculptures which connect her with the other worlds she uses to visit