Despite the scale suggested by its title, Mamute (Portuguese for "mammoth") is an intimate excavation of memory. Gomes layers lace, fabric, and thread over wood, stitching them into a form that evokes both fossil and relic—an object seemingly unearthed from time. While the work’s title hints at ancestral scale, its materials whisper fragility. 

Part of Gomes’s series Raízes, or “roots,” Mamute embodies the artist’s exploration of origins. Often repurposed from domestic or discarded sources, the fabrics carry traces of past lives. A repurposed plush backpack in the form of a frog suggests a connection to a long-ago childhood. The wood base, a tree root from a river in Gomes’s native Minas Gerais, found by the artist and her collaborators, grounds the piece literally and metaphorically, suggesting a connection to earth and tradition.