Mairagens: How To Create New Objects Of Desire?

A brief account of my trajectory as a designer.

About six years ago I was so lost during my graduation. Doing the work only under demands of each subject, trying to please teachers to get good grades. But what distressed me more and more every day is that my work made less sense and have less uniqueness in each unit. They not dialogued one with the other .

Was when a good friend at the time told me: Maira, why you don’t stop doing something random for each unit and starts to do something for yourself, something that you really like to do.

I was in shock. In my 20 years of life till that moment, nobody had never ever told me to do something I liked. I had no idea of what I really liked in that moment. I had never asked myself and no one else had never asked me that question.

So that was the key moment that changed the entire story of my graduation and probably of my life. I had to stare at me from the front, to look inside and ask me definitely:

What do you love?

Where is your desire as a designer?

The answer didn’t come ready, but I decided that starting in that moment I would continue to ask myself about it, and someday when I didn’t expect I remembered how much I used to enjoy making origami (paper folding) in my adolescence, how good I was at this and how this activity used to give me pleasure, so I decided to resume these experimentations with paper. I did a test with parchment paper for a photograph analogical unit and how I was surprised when the results were beautiful and the teachers began to praise and encourage me to keep those projects and delve into them.

This began in 2011 and since then I never stopped to work with paper folding. Developed frames of origami, then made collections of accessory, prints, serigraphs, and the more I dived more and more ideas emerged, culminating in my work of conclusion of graduation: “Habitable Sculptures” which I’ll speak more calmly about in another edition, coming soon.

But don’t stop there, even after finished my graduation the sculpture pieces became performances, scenarios of piece of theater, decoration of events. After this I started to teach origami for all kind of public: Retired persons, children with specials needs, children of any age, adults, as art therapy, and that always fed me more and more. Origami became my profession, my passion and my work together.

I’ll never say that it was easy. Trust in your work, have self confidence to show your work to the world, be ready to handle with the critics is difficult. Sometimes our creativity is blocked also, but when you know that you love something you have to keep working and trust in your work.

So in 2015 I decided to start over all, leaving designs in black and white and conceptual art pieces behind and started to do things that I thought just beautiful, pieces of decoration to brighten homes. I made a frame, made two, I posted some things on the internet, and behold, a friend discloses another and again when I least expect orders arise more and more, invitations to fairs, invitations to exhibitions.

But the imagination never stops and when we begins to breathe work and wanting to innovate more and more. Behold arise luminaries.

I created the luminaries because I love Tsurus (birds of paper) but was saturated see them in accessories, trinkets or mobiles often obvious and wanted to do something really different and innovative with them. Makes them an object of desire. And then came the idea of lights of led through the paper, created the luminaries and the audience fell in love.

The “Mairagens” is a big part of me, is a place to kidding and is also my work. Is the way to express myself in a free way. For a side my objective was to sell, but for other my objective was also do something that I really thought that was beautiful and that give me pleasure. Create a connection between this two worlds: business and desire I think is the key for the success as a designer.

My brand was in the beginning to happen when the opportunity to teach (my other passion) appeared, and feeling that here I could mix these two worlds and learn more and more about other culture to inspire myself so I thought that the brand would expect me a little in Brazil, and to feed me those colors, smells and flavors of India just will make me well as a designer.

All this is just to say here that everything that we have to do is to pull the thread of imagination, be really persistent. We must never be afraid to show our works, ask new opinions, ask help, and keep working because only with hard work you can do something really new and innovative.

Look to the world every day thinking: how can I do this better? Fed yourself of world. Let everything inspire you. Try to learn something new, even small things every day. Be a designer is be innovative.

Because sometimes the creativity is locked, but if we have willing to open more and more eyes and look around, sure new ideas arrive. And if you do what you love and always makes with love, success is guaranteed!

I think the only way to create objects of desire is creating something that give pleasure and satisfy yourself, when you do something with love and giving you best, there’s no way to get wrong.

By Maira Gouveia

Pics: Luiza Bongir

More info: mairagouveia.tumblr.com