My childhood critter ‘’is a fearsome critter’’ (2022)
A critter is pretty strange! How do you define "critter": "a living creature", whether wild or domestic - it can also mean "a child" when used as a sympathetic term of endearment, or it can mean "an unfortunate person". It is an expressive anomaly that seeks some kind of relationship or affection. The creature that seeks contact.
It is never specified what type of creature a Critter is. The character of the Critters themselves is usually comical rather than fearsome. Emphasis is often placed on behavioral characteristics and little or nothing is said about their appearance.
'The critter of my childhood is a scary critter' is what we think when we talk about it. The works of Geraldo dos Santos are based on emotional input. How we grew up as children to a certain complexity towards colors and their behavior. The organic design suggests some kind of creature, and the long intertwining of the fingers restrains and warns the animal and its environment.
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Critter tree, ceramics 35 x 15 x 15cm (2022)
Critter tree II, ceramics 60 x 25 x 25cm (2022)
the mist critter, ceramics 65 x 45 x 30cm (2022)
The real me is a myth
We all want other people to understand us and appreciate us for who we really are. In striving to achieve such relationships, we typically assume that there is a “real me”. But how do we actually know who we are? It may seem simple, we are a product of our life experiences, which can be easily accessed through our memories of the past. Those memories shape a person’s identity. But it turns out that identity is often not a truthful representation of who we are anyway. Even if we are sure of your own memory, we don’t actually access and use all available memories when creating personal narratives. It is becoming increasingly clear that at any given moment we unwarily tend to choose and pick what to remember and when.
The false me is a myth
The false me are those memories that have to do with the truthfulness of the memories, which each time are chosen to become part of a personal narrative. Even when we correctly rely on our memories, they can be highly inaccurate or outright false. We often make up memories of events that never happened and remembering is not like playing a video from the past in your mind, it is a highly reconstructive process that depends on knowledge and data, a self-image to pass by with needs and goals. Memories are therefore very malleable, they can be distorted and changed easily, we know that suggestions of the past with imagination can create memories that are very detailed and emotional, while still completely false. Dichotomy manipulation of the memory is picking and choosing memories is actually the norm, guided by self-enhancing decisions that lead us to rewrite our past so it resembles what we feel and believe now. Inaccurate memories and narratives are necessary, resulting from the need to maintain a vivid momentum, up-to-date sense of self.