Paula Pereira (left) and Pernilla Andersson (right) hand cut vinyl for their art piece “We are Humans.”
Living in different countries and having different artistic backgrounds didn’t stop two San Jose State international alumna from forming an unlikely partnership to discover a magnetic new art medium.
Bay Area-located artist duo, t.w.five is composed of Paula Pereira and Pernilla Andersson, who experiment with thin
adhesive-backed vinyl plastics to create art pieces.
Andersson came to SJSU from Sweden to study expressive painting in 1994. Seven years later, Pereira came to SJSU from Brazil to study screen paintings and photography. Pereira went by the name “t.w.,” which was short for “thirsty wall” back in her Brazilian hometown.
She used that alias when she made posters and spray painted graffiti in Brazil.
“In Brazil, there’s a lot of outer walls. In every city, that has graffiti all over it [and when] I moved here to America, I felt like the walls were really empty and I thought they were thirsty for some kind of art,” Pereira said. “That’s how I got the name.”
Andersson went by the nickname “Five” when she lived in Sweden and kept the name when she came to the U.S. so she wouldn’t be recognized as a female artist and could remain gender neutral.
“For me, it was important that my art wasn’t judged by my gender and also because I find that being a man in the art world was almost like an advantage,” she said. “So I just kept my [female] name off of my artwork.”
The two artists met through mutual friends at an art exhibit in Downtown San Jose.
Andersson said she was showcasing her work at the exhibit and Pereira came with some of Andersson’s friends from SJSU to pay her a visit. They started talking, but never considered being partners because they had different art concentrations.
The two began working together by accident after they took a trip to New York and had to share one camera. They were each participating in the same art show, displaying their own projects when they discovered they had a lot in common, according to a August 2016 article from 7×7, a local insider website.
“When we came back here [after the trip], I was going to have a small [art] show and I wanted to use some of those pictures,” Pereira said. “Pernilla said ‘if you want to use those, you can only use it if we do something together because we took the pictures together.’ ”
Pereira thought the two of them could experiment with using vinyl in their art, something neither of them were familiar with yet.
Vinyl is a very thin piece of plastic material that is usually used for vinyl records and comes in a variety of colors. The duo wanted to experiment by layering different colored vinyls into unique shapes on a blank canvas to create their desired design.
Andersson agreed to using vinyl, but only if they hand-cut the material to make it more appealing to the eye and layered it to make it more three dimensional.
“The thing with this process is it creates all these layers and it’s almost like you are painting. When you get up close to the pieces you will see all the layerings and also the direction of all those pieces that we lay down,” Andersson said. “The process is a tedious process.”
T.w.five works with thousands of hefty rolls of thin vinyl plastics and uses only their hands, rulers, scissors and a precision knife to cut the right color combinations of material in order to layer the smooth and light pieces together. Each roll of vinyl is uniquely hand cut to bring alive life-size designs that the pair carefully plan and spend months layering, which also gives depth to their designs.
Erik Friedman, a longtime mentor of t.w.five and an SJSU art professor, is amazed by the work they create.
“When you see it in person, it’s astounding, because you start seeing all these pieces being put together and it’s like this puzzle you just can’t understand,” Friedman said.
Andersson said that using vinyl was a new challenge they had to conquer and they needed to take some time to develop a technique that worked for both of their art styles.
“You know we have our backgrounds, we know what we have learned from school, we know about art and design, we have our own aesthetic,” Andersson said. “But there’s still that challenge because we’re working with material that we’ve never worked with.”
However, t.w.five’s process of having pieces of vinyl overlapping each other and not perfectly lined up worked for them and looked unique.
“I don’t even understand their process at all of how they do it. It just blows my mind because it just seems so absolutely complex in terms of layering and their colors. It’s fanatic,” Friedman said.