The House of My Imagination

28 Pages·2013·1.98 MB·English

The House
of My Imagination

Lecture by oLga de amaraL at the metropoLitan museum of art
1
Cover:
glyph vi, 2003.
Backcover:
glyphs i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi, 2003.
The House
of My Imagination

Lecture by oLga de amaraL at the metropoLitan museum of art
apriL 24, 2003
4
The House of My Imagination
Lecture by oLga de amaraL at the metropoLitan museum of art

ab r iL 2 4 , 2 0 0 3
good evening, it is an honor for me to be here. I would
like to thank Philippe de Montebello, director of the Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art, David McKinney, president of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Emily Rafferty, Senior
Vice-president of External Affairs, Jane Adlin, Assistant
Curator of Modern Art; Donna Sutton and Jennifer Mock,
Audience Development specialists and Emilia Cortes of Tex-
tile Conservation for this opportunity to present my work. I
am also deeply grateful to Bob and Charlotte Kornstein for
their commitment during the last fifteen years. Thank you
distinguished guests and friends.
I was born in Bogotá, Colombia. Today it is a nation in
conflict, where poverty and violence exist alongside heroic
people and extraordinary natural beauty. Today one lives and
breathes a sensation of instability and fear.
Facing page:
Colombia was very different in my youth. Then, one could alquimia 13, 1984.
Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
travel with relative safety throughout the country. We could go
Previous page:
to the highlands, the hot and densely populated valleys or the House in Chinchina, Colombia.
vast untouched tropical plains of the llanos. One could take the
train or car to any of the cities or small towns that dotted the
† The following numbered reproductions were projected
during my lecture. The lecture concluded with the video
high mountains. And even though life was difficult for many,
“The house of my imagination”, which further illustrated
the physical elaboration of my work as well as the differ-
people were hard-working, skilled and had great dignity. They ent creative influences.
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1. Linen fibers.
were warm and friendly but quiet. I have many memories of
that lost country.
Bogotá, where I have lived my entire life, is a populous city
in a savannah very high in the Andes and far from the sea. It
is cool, gray and rainy, nestled in a landscape of deep, dark-
green vegetation. During my youth, society was religious and
traditional. People were solemn and reserved. They dressed in
dark clothes which contrasted starkly with the white-washed
walls of the buildings and the red tiles of the roofs.

2. Linen and
I have been in the world of fiber for forty years after being
cotton fiber.
introduced to textiles at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michi-
gan. For this reason I hold a special place in my heart for North
America whose people have enthusiastically and generously
supported my work and career.
This evening I want to familiarize all of you with my work
during the last 20 years, since I consider these years to be the
most fulfilling of my forty-five-year career. I will start with a
description of the materials I have been using for the last 20
years and how these materials become finished pieces. I will
likewise mention the thoughts, dreams, experiences and ideas
that are also indispensable to my work.
One of my favorite materials is linen. It is a vegetable fiber;
thin, clean and hard as a line, texture-less and pure . These
lines of linen give tension and flatten the surface of the final
3. Linen and cotton elements.
cloth. Alone, it is a beautiful fiber. In the same manner, cotton
is a clean, white natural fiber. Its spongy resilience adapts to
the structure of the linen thread.
Weaving linen and cotton together creates the perfect sur-
face: a clay-like cloth that is the basis of the strips which are, in
turn, the cornerstone of my work . I have always thought
about them as a way of making the thin, elemental thread, much
larger and more visible. From these strips I develop my first
4. Lucy Rie’s
mended vase. rectangular, perfectly proportioned, fundamental units .
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These woven fragments are the “words” I use to begin creating
landscapes of surfaces, textures, emotions, memories, meanings
and connections.
In 1970 I spent an afternoon admiring Lucie Rie´s ceramics
in her studio in London . There I took special notice (and
then bought) a vase which had been fixed. She explained to
5. complete fragment with gold-leaf, 1973.
me that she had highlighted the mending with gold, a tech-
nique she credited to Japanese artisans. She considered fixing
6. complete
to be an act of love and respect. This use of gold touched a
fragment
with gold-leaf,
mysterious place in my mind. Four years later, while living in 1980.
Paris, I started using gold-leaf in a small group of pieces that I
called Complete Fragments . From then on, gold became an
important material in my work. My search centered on how I
could turn textile into golden surfaces of light .
The basic units of linen and cotton that I mentioned
before, already had the metaphorical quality of purity asso-
ciated with gold. However, in a material sense, the surfaces
needed more work to achieve a simpler state. So I started
white-washing with gesso to cover and fill the spaces left in
the weaving —to stiffen, smooth, cleanse and give body to the
units, to heighten the sensation of austerity and to prepare
and protect each one ; all this without losing the under-
lying woven texture.
Later on I found that gesso and stucco allowed me to create
7. White-washed elements.
inscriptions and bas-reliefs of different simple geometric fig-
ures such as suns, spirals, circles and squares that enriched the
meaning of these surfaces and endowed them with a time-less
quality, like glyphs and inscriptions do to stones. To mask the
dry and abrasive quality that white-washing with gesso gave
to these small bodies, I covered them with rice-paper. This
also reinforced them and gave them a fluid, organic sheen
while always leaving traces of what lies beneath. Finally, I
applied the gold-leaf. All these procedures leave their mark. 8. Elements with gold-leaf stored in bundles.
7
These layers, captured sensations, warps and wefts were now
ready to be preserved and expanded into surfaces of gold .
Plaiting, weaving and joining the different golden strands,
strips and chords allowed me to curve, bend and drape gold
freely. However, to fulfill my visions of vast imaginary land-
scapes, I wanted larger quantities of these woven golden ele-
9. Coils of strips ready for use.
ments. To make them, I needed additional hands with a certain
state of mind; a certain pace, silence, concentration and love for
the craft. Each of these hearts had to have a unique skill, be it
weaving, cutting, soaking in tea, applying gesso or rice-paper,
painting or gilding, burnishing or stitching.
For the last 25 years I have worked with seven lives, four-
teen hands-seven women who infuse each small element with
10. alquimia 88, 2000.
Colombia´s vitality. The communal process impregnates each
bundle of strands with the spirit of each of these women’s lives;
each element acquires a unique patina, as does the knob on
the door to a frequented room. These layers of work and time
finally affect the surface quality. It is difficult to explain what
happens in that space. The time, the changes, the choices, the
pace of the work, the silence or music, the personal stories…
This team of weavers, this place, is my strongest and deepest
connection with my country. To me they embody Colombia.
11.
alquimia 90,
2000. With them I manage to make quantities of these elaborate
threads and long lines of material which I call strands, strips
or chords .
After 25 years this small intimate process still surprises me.
I have to take these strands and weave them together again and
again into larger pieces—to reach a recondite understanding.
As I build these surfaces, I create spaces of meditation, contem-
plation and reflection. Every small unit that forms the surface
is not only significant in itself, but it is also deeply resonant
of the whole. Likewise, the whole is deeply resonant of each
12. Woven Wall,
1970. individual element.
8
The harmony and balance between the whole and the partic-
ular is fundamental to my work. Its most evident manifestation
is in the different qualities of the textures which is defined by the
proportion of the basic units in relation to the complete piece.
Modifying these scales sets the emotional tone of the surface
and gives rise to the different groups of tapestries.
13. Leaf storm, 1971.
The titles of my series reveal various distinct themes: Al-
chemies, Moonbaskets, Lost Images, Ceremonial Cloths, Writings,
Forests, Rivers, Mountains, Moons, Square Suns, Umbras and
Stelae.
Alquimia 13, the Metropolitan´s tapestry, belongs to the
Alquimias series which were the first clear and precise incarna-
tions of a vague idea that had dawned upon me on seeing Lucy
14.
Rie´s mended vases . The first thirteen works in this series
Different
varieties
were based on the proportion of the human figure. I did this in
of strips and
strands.
homage to a pre-Columbian gold mantle I had the fortune of
seeing in Peru´s Gold Museum. During that same visit to Peru
in 1969 I was also overwhelmed by the ancestral intelligence
—the unconscious high mathematics— present in everything
textile in ancient Andean culture. It was an awareness that
seemed almost genetic. I remember entering the home of an
ageless Quechua woman who was rapidly moving her fingers
and hands in the penumbra of her mud hut, weaving an endless
path… as easily as if she were breathing. I felt an affinity with
15.
alquimia 73,
her absorbed and distant concentration. It has always been my
1988.
desire to induce a similar state of silence in the places where I
install my pieces.
With the Alquimias I also became aware that gold made
weaving look heavy and flexible . These tapestries hang
in a extremely vertical gravitational way, a quality that makes
each tapestry a dense inhabitant of its own space. I further
emphasized their presence by separating the pieces from the
wall to make them live in their own unique space. 16. Yanoama baskets.
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17.
moonbasket 55, When I started doing this, I liked the atmospheres that
1983; detail.
began to appear. I imagined groups of tapestries in the same
way that I had grouped small units to create each finished
work. Putting these surfaces together I captured the mood one
feels on entering the spaces of colonial churches and the burial
chambers of pre-columbian cultures.
I would like to mention that many of my early large-scale
weavings had an architectural and sculptural intention .
They were massive constructions woven with heavy fibers such
as horsehair and coarse wool. They were either free-standing,
three-dimensional volumes or structures that physically de-
fined spaces .
The Alquimias and most of my recent work are more con-
cerned with how surfaces, textures and finishes transform the
space they contain or occupy . This series, the first to be
done entirely with gold-leaf, was a clear solution to many chal-
lenges, and it represented a big step towards many new ideas.
Additionally, the Alquimias allowed me to gain a great deal
of skill in creating basic materials. Reinventing surfaces with
18.
moonbasket 55,
these strips, strands and cords became natural. These new units
1983.
of material were special tools, tools endowed with spirit, that
lay heaped, coiled, or stacked by my side. They were also the
raw material I needed to make objects out of my own thoughts.
They were ideas locked on the warp of experience—something
similar to the Kogui Indian´s concept of spinning as an individ-
ual act in the face of weaving as the insertion of the individual
into the fabric of society .
These experiences were producing heavy surfaces. Tapestry,
fibers, strands, units, cords, all are transparent layers with their
own meanings, revealing each other to make one presence, one
tone that talks about the texture of time. The titles of these
19. surfaces help evoke the basic ideas that brought them forth.
moonbasket 44,
1987.
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