Opening one of the six volumes that compose the Encyclopaedia of Fantasy modified by Sonia Gomes is to find a page that has become an object: a curved cutout offers us a glimpse into the next page, a margin’s shadow ripples unencumbered, a continuous line circles around a sentence, breaking the following one. It is not about illustrating tales but about translating Gomes’s textile grammar into book format: her drawings act as symbolic stitching, her cuts as openings of time. The artist converts reading into a tactile gesture and reinscribes childhood as a territory of reparation.

Since 2018, Gomes has been working on the six volumes of an Encyclopaedia of Fantasy gifted to her, rearranging them through cutting and drawing. By modifying a repository of fables shaped by the European editorial canon – without losing sight of the diverse origins and oral reinterpretations that moulded them –, the artist reopens the book’s material from an Afro-Brazilian, biracial, female perspective. These volumes are not just transformed objects; they are testimonies of a gesture that rewrites the world through its very material.

The open pages of Sonia Gomes’s books are, above all, object-bodies. The artist approaches these books as someone approaches fabric – and this is not just a metaphor. Since the 1990s, her sculptures have arisen from the manipulation of textile materials, lace and thread, where actual sewing binds and holds shapes. But in books there is no sewing or collage involved: there are drawn lines and cut paper. The continuity between these dimensions is in the gesture: the thread that sews is the line that draws here; the cut that pierces also opens the page and airs out its inside. Sewing turns into visual writing; patching becomes background composition and colour.

On a double page, an elliptical cutout opens the inner margin and lets the light pass through; the graffitied contour circles a paragraph and cuts the tale’s moral in half; the text, made visible by the new frame, highlights a series of words that act as an image. The reading becomes tactile: we turn a page to confirm what the cutout promises and the book goes from sequence to montage.

In this way, the book is no longer a flat surface of meaning and becomes a body in potential, woven by layers of light (openings), shadow (overlays) and rhythm (lines). In the images, a circular movement runs across the pages: redrawn margins create frames that remind us of stained glass, windows and labyrinths. There is a vibration of colour – intense reds, lilacs, greens, deep blues – that dissolves the hierarchy of the page. The printed words become visual texture; silhouettes and forms delineated in graphite, ink or coloured pencil fluctuate like returning memories. Far from being a fixed depository of meaning, the book arises as an organism in transformation.

Gomes chose the Encyclopaedia of Fantasy deliberately. It is a collection of children’s fables and tales that have moulded the imagination of generations. By using it as a starting point, Gomes proposed to rewrite the way in which this repertory operates. The book seems to tell the same stories, but from the inside out. The printed text is not erased: it coexists with lines that contour it, cuts that break it, and graphic paths that detour it. The point of view changes: female figures – princesses, fairies – become manifold, vibrant presences, sometimes fragmented but never passive. In these redrawn contours, the feminine is affirmed as a creative and resilient force.

This work also reinscribes childhood into the realm of memory and history. In Caetanópolis, Minas Gerais, where she grew up, the daughter of a black mother and a white father, Gomes lived in an environment marked by the legacy of both slavery, and racial and social divisions. From early on, she learned how to work with leftover fabric – which in her sculptures became reused textiles, with seams resembling visible scars. By modifying books of fables now, the artist transforms that memory, turning the colonial legacy into a field of invention and freedom.

The similarity between text and textile is central to Sonia Gomes’s work. The etymology of ‘text’ (from the Latin textus) finds a precise translation here. In these books, the printed text becomes graphic material: it is crossed by lines, cut and reconfigured by openings and negatives, as if the paper were fabric. That which in other pieces would be a line of stitching here appears as a drawn line – continuous, winding, occasionally interrupted and resumed, like a handwritten text. Reading is also a physical act: the gaze runs across the page like fingers across a piece of clothing. Gomes recovers and exalts that tactile dimension through the thickness of the paper, the empty spaces and the intensity of the lines.

This tactile dimension dialogues with techniques and types of care relegated to the domestic sphere – socially feminised knowledge that is often undervalued. For centuries, embroidering and sewing were activities associated with care and repetition. In Gomes’s work, these practices migrate to contemporary art as a language of resistance. In these books, the drawn line introduces the mark of the black female body into the space of written culture – usually dominated by white male authority. A body that writes with another grammar: that of form and visual rhythm.

If openings create breathing space and passage, they also suspend the linearity of fables. We lose in immediate legibility, but we gain in montage, delay, attention. By cutting a sentence in half or covering the story’s moral with her drawings, Gomes displaces the promise of a ‘lesson’ to a sensorial realm, where reading is the negotiation between seeing and touching.

Since her first sculptures, Gomes has worked on gesture as memory. Her stitching is not decorative; it is a mode of connection, reparation, survival. To sew is to remember. In these books, instead of needle and thread, the gesture moves to drawing and cutting: drawing connects, cutting opens the way. The bodily memory of sewing is carried onto the page as a writing of lines. Each line extends the movement of an arm or a hand; each cut fixes a decision in place.

The intimate scale of the volumes – in contrast with the suspended monumentality of some of her sculptures – suggests closeness. Each book contains a secret. But there is also a collective dimension: as if every cut and drawing were trying to retie a historical thread. The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy – the product of a learned culture – is rewritten from a body and a sensitivity that escape it. It is an act of symbolic reappropriation: the artist reinscribes herself and her community into the history of imagination.

Sonia Gomes was born in 1948 and only reached wide international recognition after the age of sixty. Since then, her work has circulated globally, but she remains linked to her origins in Minas Gerais. The studio where she works is an extension of the domestic environment – it is full of materials, memories and found objects. This confluence of private and public, intimate and political, is a fundamental trait of her work.

In these books the domestic dimension is amplified. To turn a book – an everyday object – into a work of art is to give aesthetic dignity to the intimate realm. Gomes is not looking for monumentality; she is looking for presence. Each line, each cut, each blank space is a way of inhabiting the world and marking time with her own hand. In this sense, the books are scattered self-portraits: fragments of an autobiography made of gestures – or, more precisely, words turned into gestures.

If there is an idea that is present in Gomes’s practice, it is the disobedience of form. Nothing adheres to a rigid script. Her sculptures arise from fortuitous encounters between materials; the volumes gain shape through improvisation. Here, this principle is conveyed in the freedom of her lines and the daring of her cuts. The thread cuts across columns, circles around paragraphs, breaks up sentences – not to destroy, but to open up passages. The disobedience is also cultural: by intervening in a childhood compendium, the artist challenges hierarchies between erudite and popular, writing and orality, forging a dialogue between book and textile, story and song, paper and body.

Each volume of the Encyclopaedia of Fantasy modified by Gomes is an exercise in metamorphosis. In some pages, linear ornaments interweave with the text, like ivy; in others, cuts serve as windows, showing other layers underneath and producing suspensions of meaning. There are also blank spaces that let the air in, in contrast with the chromatic exuberance of other parts. Linear sequence gives way to drifting; we wander between fragments and rhythms. The book, which before promised a linear reading, becomes a field for exploration.

If there is a writing in Sonia Gomes, it is made of threads. In her sculptures, the thread sews and fastens; in the books, it is a drawing that connects and reorganises. By drawing on paper, the artist is inscribing an illegible but significant writing: the writing of the body, which obeys the logic of impulse and rhythm. The thread runs through the printed text, breaking and reorienting it – and in that gesture it inscribes another narrative.

This writing is also a form of care. In her sculpture, the sewing rearranges what has been torn. In the books, drawing and cutting perform a similar role: they open wounds and then close them up symbolically; both revealing and caring for them. Incisions and trajectories become visible scars – not camouflaged but celebrated as places of beauty. In this inversion lies a profound force: the transformation of harm into aesthetic and ethical possibility.

Originally, Encyclopaedia of Fantasy was a repository of tales of escape. In the hands of Sonia Gomes, enchantment becomes a form of resistance. Fantasy is not escape; it is reinvention. The pages do not distance us from the world; they give it back to us, multiplied and unfinished. By reenchanting the book, the artist revives the idea of art as a space for reparation and communion. The books she modified are meeting points between past and present, Brazil and the world, feminine and collective, dream and memory – a poetics of connection. The line that connects – whether it is a thread in a sculpture or a line in a book – is the same one that symbolically keeps the world united.

In the end, what remains is the image of the open page as a beating heart: book-object, text-body, thread that guides reading and care. These six volumes show how Gomes translates a textile grammar into an artist’s book, reconfiguring childhood as a space of invention and reparation.