Since about 20 years Ligia Dias has been developing her own practice within art, design and fashion, working in parallel for international luxury fashion brands and renowned artistic directors. Her work explores the intimate relationship between these fields of creation, the analysis of the role of objects, and of the auteur as producer.

Dias creates functional and non-functional objects mixing standard materials from hardware and jewelry stores, leftovers of her production as well as found objects. The use of discarded, recycled or found matters is an opposition to the overproduction of objects. Especially coming from an industry known to be wasteful, she no longer buys raw materials until the stock that served her former productions is exhausted and recycled in her newest creations. In her process she also adopts various craft techniques which she does not seek to master, and gives equivalency to materials considered precious or non-precious.

Appropriation and transmission are at the core of her practice and most works feature a tribute to other artists, designers, or friends. One of her main inspirations comes from her encounter with the Anni Albers and Alexander Reed necklaces from the 1940s, in particular the one composed of washers and grosgrain ribbon. That influence is the starting point of her jewelry work (ANNI, 2005), as well as her artistic practice — in LA1(2021), she has replaced the leather seat of the MR10 chair by Mies van der Rohe with the same strands of washers and ribbon, a gesture that cancels its functional property. That is one of the many aesthetic crossovers Dias makes after mentors such as William Morris, Nancy Holt and Mike Kelley. All the works are titled accordingly, like an archival system.

Since 2017 Dias is curating the project THE CORNER PIECE that brings together conceptual and craft practices, questioning the notion of artistic field and the subjective value of a given object, be it an artwork or a product, as well as the exhibition form in itself. The project has been staged at Independent Art Fair in Brussels (2017), with the gallery Martina Simeti at Design Miami in Miami (2018), at Galleria Francisco Fino in Lisbon (2019), and Gallery complete Works in Geneva (2019).

Ligia Dias works feature public collections as Swiss Art Collection/mudac, Frac Normandie, and CNAP in France among others. She lives in Geneva.

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