Escaping an increasingly heated political climate in the late 1960s, Van Scherpenberg moved to a remote island in the delta of the Amazon river, where she worked in isolation, in collaboration with only the natural world. Her first UK exhibition ‘Overlooking the Amazon’ came together as a result of the artist’s renewed fears regarding the safety of her body of work under Brazil’s current rightwing leader, Jair Bolsonaro – and so the gallery turned guardian, safeguarding the work from present-day political extremism.
Brunson uses her curatorial connections to forge new links, creating newly expanded histories. Pulling those from the margins into the centre, Brunson inserts Latin American art within the canon of western Art History. As a Curator she has a significant, personal and academic understanding of the region, which enables her to truly explore and discover, without the prejudices or predictability of those with a lesser command of the subject.