“Hello!! Is anybody in there?!!”

This was one little boy’s reaction to Brasilian artist Maria Nepomuceno’s sculpture-installations during my visit to her recently opened exhibit at north London’s Victoria Miro gallery. The adults in the room (including myself) were moving around the intriguing rope and straw sculptures with wide-eyed wonder, but this boy got straight to the point, getting as close as he dared to one of the suspended, flower-like openings and repeatedly shouting into it, “Hello! Hello!”

He was right though. Nepomuceno’s sculptures have a familiar, lifelike feel to them. They spill down from walls, over themselves and across the floor like a new breed of colourful, otherwordly organisms colonising the room. The more time you spend with them, the more possibilities you see in their forms: orifices, wounds, lungs and organs, twisted limbs, and gracefully deflated postures among them.

There is something a little Louis Bourgeois-like to these forms. While vivid colours and textures give a far more lively effect, they share a certain kinship with many of Bourgeois’ works in their ability to make the viewer ponder the human body in an ambiguous, sometimes disconcerting way.

Nepomuceno, who lives and works from her native Rio de Janeiro, uses materials with a poetic kinship to her own experiences as a woman of Latin America. Ropes reference umbilical cords that connect and give life, and the spiral pattern she works from is as found throughout nature as an indication of movement and growth. These materials and shapes (ropes, beads, hammocks, and straw) are a principal part of her process and carry cultural significance through their usage from indigenous times through to the everyday and now into the gallery space in a completely contemporary context. This functional juxtaposition shows evolution, while also giving the forms a strong connection with the past.

Where Nepomuceno diverges from Bourgeois is that her works cannot be described as overtly dysmorphic, fearful or solitary. They can seem strange and uncertain, yes, but only in that they toss up for the viewer the wide, varied and often wonderous nature of life. Nepomuceno’s meticulous layering of shapes and textures helps to convey shared experiences and the way that she reuses materials and forms (often from her own past works) seems to say that nothing is definitive, no end determined. The experiences we pass through—loves, pains, births and deaths—may feel absolute but the beauty is that these often overwhelming processes have been happening daily since life began and will of course continue occurring for generations to come.