THE DISSONANCE METHOD ™
The Dissonance Method is a creative framework developed by Brazilian-born, Canada-based sculptor and researcher Nayara Nascimento. It emerged naturally through her hands-on practice, where emotional rupture, material resistance, and intuitive decision-making began shaping form as much as intention did.
Rather than treating uncertainty or interruption as obstacles, the method works with them. The process unfolds through response rather than prediction, allowing the piece to shift, contradict, and evolve as it’s being made. The final form isn’t the result of control, but of negotiation.
FOUNDATIONAL WRITING (Original Notes, 2024–2025)​
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I didn't set out to become an artist. I just kept breaking things. And somewhere between the fragments, something started to take shape. For years I thought I was chasing beauty. But I was looking for what lives beneath it, something that can’t be forced, only revealed through process.
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I come from contradiction, a life shaped by discipline and disruption, structure and uncertainty. I never fully fit anywhere. I was told I felt too much, thought too strangely, moved through the world in ways that didn’t make sense to others. I became an adult still unsure where I belonged…until I started making things with my hands. Everything I create begins the same way: with dissonance. A feeling that doesn't make sense. It can be a heaviness in the chest, a hum in the body, a crack that asks to be followed.
This process began not as a theory, but as survival. I was sculpting because I didn’t have words for what was happening inside me; I was making sense by making form. I was recording ruptures, translating emotional breaks into physical form. I realized that emotional disconnection is not a failure; it’s a signal for invention. The Dissonance Method is the practice of turning that raw signal into lasting form.
This isn’t a story of finding perfection or fixing myself. It’s a record of process…of becoming, of learning to trust what my hands know before my mind does. Through this method, the chaos of my life became the blueprint for my growth. It taught me how to stop filtering my sensitivity and use it as my most profound form of intelligence. Instead of fighting the crack, I learned to follow it.
Over time, I gave names to the core practices that emerged from this process: Inner Fluency, Energetic Listening, and The Innovation Loop. These aren’t rigid techniques or poetic metaphors, they’re simple descriptions of what happens when you stop fighting your own dissonance. They all revolve around learning to hold chaos and clarity in the same hand.
Inner Fluency: What the Body Knows Before the Mind Understands
Inner Fluency is the ability to interpret the body’s signals as a form of intelligence, instead of dismissing them as "noise." It’s a kind of bodily literacy; learning to listen to what your skin, gut, and bones are telling you. I used to think my sensitivity was a weakness. Now I know it’s the reason I can hear what the material is trying to say.
For example, rather than ignoring a tightness in my chest, I treat it as information. In my studio, if I feel tension in my body, I let it guide the sculpture: if I’m tight, the form might tighten; if I’m overwhelmed, the structure might strain or sag…and I surrender. This is me admitting that my body often knows before I do. The more fluently I listen to my body, the less fragmented I feel. It’s as if the parts of me are finally speaking a common language, one that doesn't need words.
Energetic Listening: Creation as a Conversation
If Inner Fluency is listening within, Energetic Listening is listening beyond the boundaries of self. It’s a heightened attunement to the space around me. When I work, I’m in dialogue with my surroundings.
Sometimes I’ll catch my hand doing something I didn’t plan, like pausing at a critical moment or altering a curve. Later I realize that pause saved the piece from cracking, or that curve echoed something I’d subconsciously absorbed, from a memory, or simply the feel of the day. Energetic Listening is acknowledging that I’m responding to an ecosystem of energies. I think of it as my nervous system picking up on cues in the environment, like a kind of radar. By listening energetically, I allow those unseen forces to collaborate with me. I am not in control, I’m in a dialogue. I stop being the sole author and become an improvisational partner with my materials and environment. This has taught me a humility and openness in creating: the recognition that sometimes the piece knows something I don’t, and if I get quiet enough, I can hear it.
The Innovation Loop: From Rupture to Response (and Repeat)
I call this the Innovation Loop; a continuous cycle of rupture and renewal that dictates every project. It begins with dissonance: an emotional fragmentation. Instead of resisting the feeling, I use Inner Fluency to let it speak through my hands. Chaos turns into insight: the sculpture stabilizes, achieving a form that demands no more intervention. In that quiet click of recognition, the rupture is integrated, becoming part of the structure.
I see this most clearly in moments of surrender, like one particular sculpture.
There was a moment when I wanted to cut the top off completely. Instead, I left it. If the form wanted to become that shape, who am I to argue? …That pause, that refusal to force resolution, became part of the work.
The cycle then repeats, ensuring my growth is non-linear and permanently tied to my practice.
This method does not erase uncertainty or pain. It is not a formula for resolution, but a framework that rejects the need for neatness or comfort. Wholeness isn't sameness. Instead of trying to cure the split, I learned to use it. When I feel fragmented, I no longer see it as something to fix; I see it as architecture in progress. Dissonance becomes the draft state of a new understanding.
In the end, The Dissonance Method is just my truth in progress: a way of listening, a way of making, and a way of being. It’s about learning to hold the questions and the answers, the chaos and the clarity, all at once. It remains an intimate, ongoing conversation between inner and outer, self and material, feeling and form.
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This is the first formal written definition of the framework.
Published: June 2025
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​FIELD NOTES (Working Theory — ongoing)
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Before it had a name, the method existed as behaviour. My internal reality operates on a native language of dissonance, a simple, non-negotiable fact of my neurodivergent system. My mind, body, and emotional register rarely arrive in the same state at the same time. This is not chaos; it is the slight, constant delay between the parts of me that process reality at different speeds. I spent years exhausting myself trying to force coherence.
The making began when I accepted this condition. I realized that what I was running from, the raw, anxious, unlabelable feeling, was the most honest, necessary material I had.
My sculpture is the physical record of that signal. It is the structural proof that the most complex part of me is also the most profound.
This is not a manual for others. This is simply the internal logic of my hands.
I. INNER FLUENCY
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The body speaks, but not in patterns you can predict. Sometimes the sensation arrives first. A tightening along the ribs. A shift in breath. A warmth that spreads without an obvious cause. Other times the emotion comes before the body reacts. And there are moments where everything feels quiet and neutral, yet something underneath is still rearranging itself.
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These states rarely match in neat ways. Calm and urgency can coexist. Focus can live beside overwhelm. Softness and vigilance can appear at the same time without needing to resolve one another. I stopped expecting them to align. The mismatch is not dysfunction. It is information.
Inner Fluency is the practice of responding to those signals as they appear rather than trying to organize them into logic. There is no decoding or translation. I let them shape the work while I am making. Sometimes a shift in my chest changes the direction of a form. Sometimes the material acts first and my body adjusts. Sometimes both move together. Sometimes nothing appears to change and the work still progresses.
Thought, emotion, and sensation do not follow a hierarchy. They move like weather. Layered. Unpredictable. Meaningful in ways that only make sense through experience. Each piece becomes the record of these intersections. A form shaped through an ongoing negotiation between what is felt, what is understood, and what can only reveal itself through making.
II. ENERGETIC LISTENING
When I am in the studio, the only commitment is presence.
My work is a meeting point between reclaimed cellulose, mineral dust, and polymer-metal composites. These materials carry memory. Some were discarded. Some were overlooked. They respond on their own timelines. They resist in their own ways.
​Energetic Listening is the practice of staying attuned to those responses. As the materials cure, everything shifts. Texture thickens. Moisture evaporates. Resistance softens or sharpens. Paste begins to bind with resin. Pressure interacts with forming stability. Timing matters. Just because my hands are ready doesn’t mean the material is. And sometimes the material settles before I do.
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Sometimes the exchange between myself and the material becomes what I call Somatic Co-Curing™. The full definition will come later; for now, it refers to the moments when my nervous system and the materials register and respond to each other in real time. Elasticity shifts, temperature changes, texture thickens, density settles. I respond, pause, or continue depending on what both systems communicate. Sometimes the material leads. Sometimes I do. Often, neither is leading. The work finds its own rhythm.
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The surface that forms is not aiming for flawlessness. It reflects the reality of the exchange. It holds traces of tension, adaptation, hesitation, and alignment. Nothing is concealed. If the piece holds its function and its integrity, then it has arrived at the form it was meant to become.
The material teaches patience. It teaches restraint. It teaches that control collapses possibility. Listening keeps it alive.
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III. THE RUPTURE: IT JUST IS
The work is not about resolution. It is about a continuous cycle of breaking and holding.
Every piece begins with Rupture, the feeling of the system coming undone. That dissonance guides an immediate Material Action (Inner Fluency). That action forces the fragmentation into a controlled Integration (Energetic Listening).
The crack in the surface is never concealed. It is sealed with a new layer that holds the memory of the break, transforming the scar into a point of cohesive strength. The piece stabilizes when it achieves a quiet, undeniable click of integrity.
The truth is simple: The most authentic forms of structure emerge directly from the parts of you that don't fit.
The dissonance was the blueprint all along.
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​aeny studio Research Archive. This entry will evolve as the framework evolves.
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