Born: 1991, Toronto, Canada
Pronouns: She / Her
Website: www.raqueldasilva.com
Instagram: @raquelnaia
Biography
For Raquel Da Silva, creative expression started early and never really left. Drawing and painting have remained constants throughout her life, even as her ideas of what form art might take shifted. There was a time she imagined herself as a photographer, then later an animator—until a brief foray into animation revealed it wasn’t quite the right fit. Since then, her practice has evolved into a multidimensional exploration of memory and its emotional residue, expanding in recent years to include sculptural works alongside painting and drawing.
Artistic Practice
Da Silva’s work navigates the fragmented nature of memory—how it’s not retained as a fixed sequence but recalled in gestures, emotions, and partial imagery. Her paintings and sculptures are less concerned with representing exact recollections and more focused on the emotional charge embedded in them. Through layered compositions and textural surfaces, she evokes the sensation of remembering: blurred, symbolic, and always shifting.
Her materials vary depending on the piece, but currently she gravitates toward pigments, conte, charcoal, acrylic, and oil. For sculptural work, she experiments with paper pulp, wood, and metallic coatings. Drawing is foundational, and life studies remain an important part of her creative process.
Da Silva cites current influences such as Rococo painting, observational drawing, and 44 Plates by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo—a range that informs both the materiality and tone of her practice. Her work explores how memory morphs and bends, favoring the emotional over the literal, and asking viewers to sit with the quiet instability of how we remember.
Notable Works & Exhibitions
Residencies & Press:
• PADA Studios and Residency, Lisbon, Portugal (2021)
• The Dream World of Raquel Da Silva, The Pink Essay, New York City (2022)
In Her Words
“Raquel Da Silva is a Toronto-based mixed-media artist whose work delves into the emotional architecture of memory. Her practice explores how personal history is not stored as a fixed narrative, but rather as fragments—distorted, reassembled, and reshaped over time. Through painting and sculpture, she constructs emotional landscapes where memory acts less as a factual record and more as a symbolic residue. Da Silva’s work explores the failures of memory and how these gaps or distortions become fertile ground for reimagining the past. Her work resists chronological clarity, instead leaning into emotional truth: how a single image, gesture, or figure can carry disproportionate emotional weight even when its original context is lost. By embracing the subjectivity of perception, Da Silva’s work investigates how memory is shaped by the present moment.”
