This article seeks to shed light on the transposition of traditional crafts related to the popular religion of the Azores into the secular context of art in the works of Catarina Branco, taking two of the artist’s exhibitions – Fez-se Luz, 2012, and Alminhas, 2013 – as case studies. The research first shows how this transposition leads to the cross-fertilization of the religious and artistic domains, imbuing art with greater spirituality and introducing reflections concerning contemporary issues, such as emigration and the position of women into the context of religion. Second, I discuss how the contingent nature of craft in art is used as a disruptive element that liberates the imagination, thought and feelings, dismantling hierarchies between the manual and the intellectual, the masculine and the feminine, as well as those between religion, art and craft, through embodied gesture. Religion is here understood in its wider sense as a form of mediation of the transcendent (Meyer 2009). I argue that these works can be seen as a political gesture, which highlights the past of women who lived in anonymity, simultaneously preserving and renewing traditional crafts that are dying out while also deconstructing the false dichotomy between the manual and the intellectual or spiritual. The act of papercutting gives physical form to the experiences of Azorean women, while at the same time addressing questions relevant to the human condition, including migration and the eternal search for transcendence. Through its inevitable polysemy, this act reveals meanings that have been hidden by habit, allowing the viewer to rediscover them.

This article seeks to analyze the drift of elements of Azorean popular religion into the domain of art orchestrated by two Azorean artists, Catarina Branco and Sofia de Medeiros. The change brings unlikely marriages into fruition, uniting the humor of pop art and the solemnity of the arches of the high choir in a church, the spirit of revelry and a sign of the cross, representing the unfathomable—death, the dread of emptiness to the feeling of unity in communitas. The presentation, together with the strangeness of decontextualization provoked by this change, invoke the walk of the visitor, during which different senses are awakened, in which the poetic imagination of the observer is called forth to complete the different meanings. In this thesis I shall argue that the elements of popular religiosity carried by these artists into the domain of art constitute sensory arrangements, in the sense given to this term by Meyer, providing structure to a collective religious experience particular to Azorean culture where the sacred intertwines with the profane. The mediation of the transcendent through these sensory arrangements leads, on one hand, to contamination and reciprocal intensification of the spheres of art and religion and, on the other hand, to a renewed look at the contemporaneous and its connection to the spiritual.

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