THE DISSONANCE METHOD
Some Forms Begin in Rupture
by Nayara Nascimento
Before form, there is friction, a silence that feels heavier than sound, a pulse that doesn’t match the rhythm of the world. It’s the space between what I can sense and what I can name.
Something rawer than clarity or inspiration.
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That is where my work begins.
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I call this way of working The Dissonance Method.
It is a process built from rupture, from the distance between emotion, logic, and the body. When those parts fall out of sync, instead of trying to fix them, I follow the fracture. The tension becomes a kind of teacher.
In my studio, that fracture takes material form.
Paper pulp meets mineral dust.
Softness meets density.
Hands meet resistance.
The process begins long before a piece takes shape. It starts in that uneasy space, the moment I don’t know what I’m doing, but my hands move anyway. I listen for what resists. I stay with it. The more I resist the urge to solve, the more the work begins to respond on its own terms.
Dissonance, I’ve learned, is not chaos. It’s intelligence that hasn’t found its language yet.
Each material carries memory. Paper remembers water. Minerals remember pressure. Resin remembers time. I move between them, asking what each can hold, not as function, but as feeling. My hands compress, pull, and seal. What bonds isn’t glue; it’s trust formed through pressure, contact, and care.
Over time, these gestures form a pattern, a physical conversation between matter and emotion. I began to realize that my process was not just sculptural but philosophical. That every decision of pressure, pause, or touch was a question about coherence:
How does something stay together without becoming rigid?
How does strength coexist with vulnerability?
How can something broken still hold?
The Dissonance Method is not a fixed system. It’s a living inquiry, a way of noticing what happens when materials, thoughts, and feelings overlap before they align. It turns rupture into a site of knowledge. It treats resistance as an invitation to stay longer, to feel deeper.
In the studio, pressure becomes a form of communication.
Every touch records a negotiation between intention and surrender.
To sculpt this way is to accept that uncertainty is structural, that form doesn’t come from control, but from relationship.
It’s not about perfection. It’s about presence
The process doesn’t seek resolution; it seeks resonance, the moment when tension holds steady enough to become form.
Through this method, my work has evolved into a series of sculptural experiments that exist between art, design, and engineering. I create composite systems from reclaimed materials like paper, minerals, resin, materials that were never meant to survive the conditions I ask of them. I seal, layer, and test them until the surface can withstand both pressure and light. Every decision is a dialogue between what I feel and what the material allows.
Over time, I realized this is what coherence truly means: not the absence of difference, but the ability to hold it.
Every form I make carries that memory, of the rupture that birthed it, of the hands that stayed through resistance, of the quiet moments when the material began to speak back.
Some forms begin in rupture.
The ones that endure carry that memory like a pulse, steady, imperfect, alive.
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This essay introduces The Dissonance Method, the philosophical and material framework guiding Nayara Nascimento’s sculptural research and practice at aeny studio.