Flower Power - Porto

Maria Manuela Matos de Castro Martins was born in 1964 in Alcobaça. She grew up in the Douro region and in 1979 moved to Porto, where she studied Law. After practising as a lawyer for some years, while developing artistic work in glass in parallel, she decided to devote herself entirely to her artistic practice in 2001.

Since then she has developed various projects for the hotel sector, including works for the Hotel Ritz Four Seasons in Lisbon and for the Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues in Switzerland.

She is the author of several trophies and commemorative pieces, among them the trophy for the V Congresso Lacoste, held in Évora in 2003, the participation trophy for FITEI, the Festival Internacional de Expressão Ibérica, in Porto in 2006, as well as the participation trophies for the international concert series Porto, Cidade dos Órgãos and for the Matiné Pensante 2013 conference, held in Brussels.

Her work has been shown in exhibitions in Portugal, the United States of America, Denmark, France and Germany. Among the exhibitions held are Renda em Vidro II, at the Fundação Escultor José Rodrigues, Porto (2012); Galerie d’Art Vista Palace Hotel, France (2014); Bullseye Gallery, Portland, USA (2014); Bullseye Resource Center Bay Area, USA (2014); Pittsburgh Glass Center, USA (2015); Bellevue Arts Museum, Washington, USA (2015); À Espera de Ulisses, at the Núcleo de Arte Contemporânea of the Museu do Vidro, Marinha Grande (2016); European Glass Context 2016, Curated, at the Bornholm Art Museum, Gudhjem, Denmark (2016); Rosáceas, at the Centro Cultural de Cascais, Fundação Dom Luís I (2016); and Neuer Verbindungen 2016, at the Glasmuseum Alter Hof Herding, Germany (2017).

Her work is part of the collection of the Glasmuseum Alter Hof Herding in Germany and of the Núcleo de Arte Contemporânea of the Museu do Vidro in Marinha Grande.

Her work has also been published in Encore! The New Artisans, by Oliver Dupon, in the annual New Glass Review 36 of the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, and in the German magazine Neues Glas no. 3 (2016).

In 2014 she received the Design Prize at Emerge, the Bullseye glass biennial, in Portland, United States of America.