where the name comes from

When clay called me back, in my final year of university, it wasn't immediately clear what to do with it. I came from sculpture, from stone, and I could have returned to clay to make anything at all. The question that came to me was a different one: if I'm going back, what am I actually going back to?

It was from that question that the project started to take shape. And when I realised it wasn't going to end there, I needed to give it a name. I knew one thing at least: I didn't want a name that was only mine.

I believe an idea only grows when you don't keep it to yourself. So from the very beginning I imagined a place others could enter, hands that weren't my own.

The name came to me one morning, in that state where you're still half asleep, half awake. Out of nowhere the word pomar arrived - orchard - and I remember thinking: this is it. I got up and went to write about it, about what the word meant to me and whether it really made sense.

It did.

In an orchard, the trees need one another. They grow together, share the same soil, and it is together that they blossom and bear fruit. I like that idea of fruit, of something that takes form and then feeds someone.

My family never had an orchard.

They had land, in a village in the north of Portugal, and lived from it. On both sides, my father's and my mother's, the whole year was organised around what was planted and the animals that were raised. My grandparents still lived that way; my parents came to Lisbon. Maybe that's why the word sat so well with me. Not because of the fruit, but because of the gesture I grew up watching: planting, tending, waiting, and accepting whatever the earth decides to give that year. That was what I wanted to return to.

It's what I do with clay, really. I give a piece everything I know how to give it, and then I hand it over to the fire, which returns it to me as it pleases.

The name kept growing in my head, among many ideas and a lot of excitement. I called it pomar for some time before I noticed something.

In Portuguese, every noun has a gender. Pomar is masculine, so it takes the masculine article: o pomar. But whenever I spoke about the project to the people I love, I said a pomar, the feminine one. It came out that way without my thinking about it. By the time I noticed, it had been decided without me.

Grammatically it's a slip, a disagreement of gender that I chose to keep. And thinking about it now, it makes sense: almost everything I work with is feminine in Portuguese. A terra, the earth. A água, water. A argila, clay. A matéria, matter. A forma, form. A memória, memory. Pomar was one of the few masculine words among all of these, and that a brought it in among them.

And so it stayed a pomar and nothing ever felt so right.

I like to think that a piece begins with me and then puts down roots somewhere else, in a home I'll never see, and that the orchard composes itself that way, piece by piece.

But writing this, I realise it isn't quite true that it begins with me. I am made of other people.

Of the hands I watched working as a child, in my grandparents' soil, of those who came before them, of conversations, of references, of everything that settled in me without my choosing it.

I am already many people before I ever touch the clay.