Kim Poor's work is a combination of the 'fabulous' and the extremely down to earth and craftsmanlike. It is fabulous in the sense that the images are inspired by the myths and fables of the Amazon region of her native Brazil. The Amazonian Indian uses these traditional stories as a way of preserving tribal history. Many of these stories have never appeared in print, except in ethnographical journals and almost always in Portuguese. Kim has prepared a few selected versions in English.
Her paintings are craftsmanlike because they use the extremely demanding medium of glass powder on steel. All the colours are a mixture of powdered glass and pigment and each must be applied in an order dictated by its durability and resistance to heat. Some can be fired over and over again, some only once. Before it is fired, the powder is extraordinarily vulnerable. Kim can lose an entire picture in one gust of wind from a window left open at the wrong moment. After firing, however, the glass particles cling firmly to the steel plate and produce colours of extraordinary depth and translucency. It is not surprising that some paintings feature images of butterflies as the effect achieved finds its nearest parallel in the iridescent scales which give colour to a butterfly's wing.
Poor is, in fact, fascinated by the whole business of trying to find true equivalents for the colours and textures of the Amazonian rainforests and for the hues of the creatures that inhabit it. One of the ways in which a painting in enamel differs from one done in a more familiar medium is that light strikes through the surface and is reflected back giving Kim's paintings their characteristic glow and depth; it also means that they change as light strikes them from varying angles or with varying degrees of intensity.
The bloom of the colour is enhanced by another special characteristic, the absence of outlines. Forms are built up from minute speckles of colour; the image has no firm boundaries. This enhances the dreamlike quality of the imagery which coalesces before the spectator's eye and then seems ready to dissolve again. The paradox is that such an extremely laborious medium produces such delicately evanescent effects.
The dreamlike quality of Kim Poor's work does, of course, tend to align it with things which have often aroused comment in both Latin American art and Latin American literature. One has here yet another example of the Magic Realism which can be found in the work of great contemporary Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llose and Isabel Allende. Kim's work shares with theirs not only this dreamlike atmosphere but an undoubted narrative thrust and a typically Latin American concern with urgent contemporary problems - in this case the ecological problems of the whole Amazon basin. Kim's paintings are a celebration and also a lament for something precious which is just about to vanish from the face of the earth.