Kukas
SANDRA NOBRE
Words
MATILDE TRAVASSOS
Photography
TIMELESS LIKE HER PIECES, THE 96-YEAR-OLD KUKAS CONTINUES TO CREATE JEWELLERY. WITH HER CUSTOMARY RESTLESSNESS AND LIGHTNESS OF BEING, HER EYES REMAIN FIXED ON THE NEXT EXHIBITION.
The Tagus River is clad in silver this afternoon, as Lisbon parades past Kukas’s window. She’s no longer the girl she was when she arrived in the Castelo neighbourhood, the capital’s oldest. This is where the local women laid out their dripping clothes on the pavement, while whispering that she must be a tourist. Such was its exotic air that one of her friends exclaimed ‘this is Calabria!’ These were the days before tourists wandered in search of fado houses and rented everything around them. Having resided at the same address for over 60 years, she has seen all the changes, continuing to look down upon Lisbon from her fourth-floor flat, which she rarely leaves. ‘I go months and months indoors. But I never get bored,’ she says. Although born in the central region of Beira Baixa, in 1928, she is very much a Lisboner at heart.
Baptised Maria da Conceição de Moura Borges, she was around ten years old when a seemingly insignificant episode occurred. It happened during one of her long stays at Quinta de Santa Marta in Penamacor, and it changed her identity for good. “I had a Serra da Estrela puppy that I tried to protect from an aggressive sow. I picked him up and said ‘Poor little Kukas’. “From that day on, I was Kukas”. Years later, during cocktails aboard a ship anchored in Lisbon, she met “a handsome and friendly American”, who asked her name. The conversation flowed and continued via correspondence. “He wrote to thank me for my kindness and confessed ‘I’ve no idea how to write your name’ and wrote Kukas with two ‘k’s. And it stuck.”
Kukas was only a child when she became an orphan. She and her brother were left in the care of three unmarried aunts, their father’s sisters. “I had three wonderful mothers who brought me up and I never lacked affection,” she underlines. Ever persistent, she always battled to get what she wanted, which is how she convinced her aunts to let her go to Paris to study. Initially, they were opposed, but Eugénia, the youngest of the aunts, ended up supporting her.
Kukas wanted to study art education, following in the footsteps of a close friend, the painter Madalena Cabral, who worked at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga -MNAA (National Museum of Ancient Art). She enrolled at the École du Louvre and endeavoured to refine her artistic taste, while socialising with various Portuguese citizens who had moved to the French capital. “There was this world and the other, Lurdes Castro, her husband René Bértholo, João Vieira…’ Her list of acquaintances included famous artists: “It was there that I met [Marc] Chagall, who would pose for children to paint him at the Louvre school. It was a blessing, I really enjoyed meeting him.”
PHOTO: RICARDO JUNQUEIRA
PHOTO: RICARDO JUNQUEIRA
PHOTO: RICARDO JUNQUEIRA
Writing straight with crooked lines
In Paris, before her debut with jewellery, she studied interior design at the École Supérieure des Arts Modernes (ESAM), as well as ceramics. “They thought I was the best student in ceramics, but I can’t say...” Ever-modest when it comes to her work, she’s customarily low key. “Maybe it’s a gift, or luck, because many things have happened by chance,” she says. The fact is that her pieces sold easily. “I sold a lot in the shop that Menez had in Rua do Alecrim.”
While talking to Portico, she asks for a box with some of her creations from different phases of her career, some old, some unfinished, unique pieces. She finds a bracelet she likes: “It’s mine for the near future.” A ring with a rock crystal that she likes wearing: “It’s a tribute to I.M.Pei, the architect who designed the Louvre’s glass pyramid. I really like his work and the shape of the pyramid, which I recreated.” She has letters on rings and pins, and an ‘SOS’ gets a smile from her: “Just a mad idea I had. It looks good on my lapel”. She likes wearing her pieces, even the most extravagant ones. “I feel good in them.” She stares at another ring: “I made this one for my aunt Eugénia, 60 years ago. It’s simple, but everything started from here.”
Kukas admits that she has never been fascinated by classic jewellery and the sparkle of precious stones. “I’ve always shunned formalism and brilliance, I’m more impressed by a tourmaline or a rock crystal, which I love.” She has sought inspiration in architecture, the art she most prizes, although she has always shown great sensitivity to beauty and artistic expression. “Once, I burst out crying at a Kandinsky exhibition in Paris. And the same thing happened when I arrived at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Waterfall House [in Pittsburgh, USA], I broke down, sobbing. I still can’t explain the emotion I felt being there.” With a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation, she was working as an intern at the house that had become an icon of the American architect’s work. “I was overwhelmed by everything I saw and learnt.”
This sensitivity, combined with a geometric aesthetic that explores shapes and volumes, led to the creation of large pieces, stripped of any bourgeois ostentation. “Most people would say ‘oh, they’re enormous!’ and wouldn’t wear them. They’re not for the discreet, they’re art in transit, an idea that has always stayed with me. They go with the wearer, they’re part of gestural expression, a complement to movement.” Vanity Fair did a profile of her [July/August 2023 issue], describing her ‘a provocateur of the Portuguese jewellery scene.’ She defends herself: “That wasn’t the intention. That said, a renovator is always a provocateur.”
Back in the spotlight
Word of mouth worked well for her. Most of her clients were architects, painters and artists, such as Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Maria João Seixas and Ana Hatherly. There were also interior design projects to do. “I helped decorate a good friend’s house in Sesimbra, introducing them to Nuno Teotónio Pereira and [Nuno] Portas, who did the design. I did a room for Shell, the ceiling of the disco at the Hotel Algarve in Praia da Rocha [the first hotel-casino in Portugal, opened in 1967] which was decorated with glass stalactites, like it were a cave...” Other distractions aside, Kukas returned to the art of jewellery, for good. Inspired by her time in Paris and her discovery of Nordic jewellery, she dared to create pieces that speak to the body and are part of the wearer’s identity.
She made her debut at an exhibition staged at the Galeria do Diário de Notícias in the 1960s and never looked back. Soon after came Galeria 111, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the National Costume Museum and, further afield, group shows at the First Congress of Craftsmen in New York (1964), the São Paulo Biennial and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro (1977), not to mention the Palais des Congrès in Paris and the Royal College of Art in London (1992). She had two shops in Lisbon, which were very different in terms of decor and pieces. The first was in Praça das Flores and the second in Rua de São Bento, the latter burning down in 2002, a time when her name was already associated with signature jewellery, whose formal language she had renewed.
In 2012, Lisbon’s Museum of Design andFashion (MUDE) showed ‘Kukas - Uma Nuvem que Desaba em Chuva’, which exhibited 165 pieces from 76 collectors in a retrospective that brought her back into the limelight. At the time, she was still making objects to order from home. Spending hours and hours moulding materials, observing everything at hand, defining new shapes, this has always been her creative process. “I can’t draw well, but I like moulding. I make primary models, everything works, a cork, a package, I don’t throw anything away without first observing its shape. It’s an obsession. It can always suggest something, depending on how you look at it,” she explains. For over two decades, Alex, a goldsmith, has been visiting her to shape her creations. “He worked in a workshop where I made the pieces. He became part of my life, an asset. He understands my language, my gestures.” She has always lived for her work and never married. “I wasn’t lucky in love. It was time badly spent. That said, I feel great love and affection from my family and friends.”
Kukas’s life took another twist and turn when someone challenged her to create ceramic pieces for Casa Fortunato in Lisbon. That someone was the architect and owner of the Casa Fortunato hotel in Alcácer do Sal, not to mention the goddaughter by marriage and granddaughter of an old friend. And so, the Kukas by Casa Fortunato collection was created, offering a range of vases, butter dishes and plates. This partnership, which began in 2018, has expanded the jeweller’s horizons. “It’s stimulating. Filipa pushes me. I wake up thinking about the models and I have plenty of ideas,” she says.
In 2023, once again, the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea exhibited her pieces in the show ‘A Tribute to Geometry’, with her name highlighted in the international press [Vanity Fair, Financial Times]. Filipa Fortunato became the guardian of her legacy. She acts as a curator and manager of the Kukas brand, continuing to explore different ways of displaying the work of the artist she met as a child at her grandmother Maria’s house, and who she affectionately calls auntie. Both women aim to give more visibility to Kukas’s pieces, which can usually be seen in the showroom on Rua da Escola Politécnica.
The afternoon rolls pleasantly by on the other side of the fourth-floor window. Kukas confirms her next meeting with Alex to advance with some ideas, as well as the start of gold production. She’s enthusiastic about the possibilities of new exhibitions, having just been involved in the Autumn Art and Antiques Fair in Lisbon. In 2025, she has already booked her participation at the LAAF — Lisbon Art and Antiques Fair. “The day I lose the will to create, I’ll be on my last legs,” she insists. She doesn’t tolerate any eulogies or funeral rites, nor does she waste time on the subject, but if she had an epitaph, which is unthinkable, she would say: ‘Here lies someone very annoyed, who was never bored!’ And she laughs a laugh of a little girl who has many dreams to fulfil.
PHOTO: RICARDO JUNQUEIRA
“I’VE ALWAYS SHUNNED
FORMALISM AND BRILLIANCE, I’M MORE
IMPRESSED BY A TOURMALINE OR
A ROCK CRYSTAL, WHICH I LOVE.”