Port Townsend artist Tininha Silva’s sprawling sculptural works begin with a morning walk. Heading out from her home, she strolls several blocks downhill to the shores of Port Townsend Bay, where she hopes to encounter what she calls “beach treasures.”
These come in the form of an iridescent shell, a small chunk of driftwood or seaweed clinging to a pebble. Rather than looking for something specific, she prefers “serendipitous searching.” Here: an orange scrap of crab shell. There: a clump of barnacles on a rock.
“The inspiration for each of my pieces is really related to being by the water … surrounded by all these ocean and beach elements and colors and textures,” Silva says. She often brings a few items home, tucked into her pockets with stray grains of sand.
Her sunny studio resembles a cabinet of curiosities: wooden shelves stacked with shells and strands of dried kelp; baskets of silk, wool and twine; assorted sticks; rocks encased in mossy felt; nets of woven seagrass; raffia she hand-dyes with the beets left over from a previous night’s dinner.
Silva’s artistic projects begin to take shape in this corner of her home, blooming into large-scale, weblike wall hangings that beckon you in for a closer look. “The more organic, the more interesting it is to me,” she says. Some of the works she imagines as “portals” to another place, which feels appropriate for an artist who found her passion in a port town.
Her creative life began in Seattle, where she lived for 19 years. She spent many of those years designing and selling swimwear, including bikinis featuring original prints based on paintings by her husband Sean Yearian, an artist and builder. While she loved experimenting with textiles, she considered herself an entrepreneur. Silva always assumed Yearian was “the artist in the family.”
She saw the swimsuit shop as a way to connect with her home country of Brazil. Although Silva grew up in the arid inland, spending more time with cacti than seashells, working with colorful beach attire felt like staying in touch with her heritage. She ran the business for 12 years before moving with her family in 2018 to the Olympic Peninsula, where she fell in love with a different kind of beach culture.
A glimpse into Tininha Silva’s studio. (Brangien Davis/Cascade PBS)
Upon landing in Port Townsend — a place she fondly compares to “a town out of a children’s book” — Silva was forced to take a breather from the urban lifestyle. While working in Seattle, she felt too busy to pay much attention to nature. She didn’t take time to stop and smell the seaweed. But in her new home she was awoken by the salty air, the ribboning of bull kelp, the bleached shells on sand.
“It’s a slower pace here. Now I notice nature more,” she says. “And there are so many artists here — it’s contagious.”
Silva’s initial artistic foray was a happenstance: She saw a Pinterest post of a small weaving she found intriguing enough to try to replicate. Using cardboard and yarn gathered from around the house, she made her first mini-weaving and was hooked.
“My kids got home and they’re like, ‘That is so cute. I want one’,” she recalls. “So day after day, I was making a lot of little things. Two months later, I told my husband I wanted him to create a big loom in the kitchen.”
From the get-go, her looms were nontraditional (regular looms required her to do too much math, Silva says with a laugh). But she started with a standard X-Y axis, weaving wool, silk and raffia through vertical threads to create patterns as they came to her.
Those earlier wall hangings look hand-spun and pleasingly lumpy, with a color palette pulled from the ocean floor. But just like the sea, her artworks could not be restrained. As her creations became larger and more textural, Silva felt they should leap off the loom altogether.
One of Tininha Silva’s loom-based artworks sits in her home with paintings by husband Sean Yearian. (Brangien Davis/Cascade PBS)
“I felt the urge to go 3D,” Silva recalls. “What if I create a sculpture? What if … it comes out of the wall?” she wondered. “People will have more of this feeling that it’s alive and it’s in motion.”
Enter chicken wire. Silva describes the common poultry fencing as a “portable loom,” which she uses for the base of her amoebic sculptures. This humble material needs some adapting, as the honeycomb is a bit too regimented for her creative visions.
Accordingly, Silva snips the wires here and there, exploding the hexagons into larger, less-refined holes. She then tightly wraps the metal in raffia, masking tape, natural fibers, seaweed and other beach ephemera, adding the occasional glint of black sequins or an orange puff of fabric.
“Leaving the loom feels very liberating,” Silva says.
She works intuitively, never sketching beforehand. The resulting artworks look as if they might’ve floated in with the tide. After spending an afternoon surrounded by her sculptures you might get the sense, on your next trip to the beach, that the shoreline detritus is imitating her work.
In a recent group show at Northwind Art Gallery in downtown Port Townsend, Silva exhibited 11 pieces that show a coming-together of environmental influences old and new. Her color palette combines the green-blue-browns of the Northwest coast with the bright blue and bronze shades of her home country.
Inspired by recent visits to Brazilian beaches, Silva has started using encaustic, a wax-layering technique, to mimic the splash of sea foam. And she’s started adding white sand to the mix to resemble the hard crust of coral.
A recent work by Tininha Silva, made with chicken wire, wool, raffia, thread and encaustic. (Brangien Davis/Cascade PBS)
Silva’s works have names like “Raizes” (Roots), “Shell,” and “When the Waves Came.” But she emphasizes that she’s not trying to replicate her beach finds — she’s trying to capture the feeling of them, the emotion she had upon that first glimpse of a treasure. “It shouldn’t resemble anything specific,” she says. “But maybe many things.”
One of the pieces is called “Correnteza,” Portuguese for “currents,” which she recently said was about “the concept of flow and continuous movement of seawater driven by gravity and wind.”
Her explanation of this work could double as a description of the peninsula where she lives, as well as the way she works. She talks about how the repetitive wrapping of the wires becomes meditative, soothing. “You get in this state of flow where you spend hours working on a piece and not even feeling that four hours went by,” she says. “I could do this my whole life.”
Silva believes this newfound love of artmaking wouldn’t have happened had she not moved to Port Townsend, and consequently gained a closer relationship with nature. Now she’s in a fertile feedback loop — “The more you practice art the more you notice nature.” She’s eager to see where the tide takes her artwork next.
Tininha Silva demonstrates her encaustic technique with a wall hanging. (Still from ‘Art by Northwest’)