INTERWEAVING
LIFE AND ART
Paulina Ortiz in her own words
In the USA, while I was studying there,
I had the opportunity to work with the best of technology
to express myself in the language of the big metropolis:
I could prolong my search through the same ways that the
other contemporary artists used…but something inside
me remained empty. There was a real need to go back
to the land, to the human values of the beginning
of times, back to communion with archetypal materials.
My expression had to keep the scent of the forest, its textures,
its sensations, its noises…all these contours which,
by vocation is still intact inside of me.
The
arboreal elements became extensions of my own body
that evolved in concepts very tightly bound to my maternity
and the joys and fears that pregnancy produced in me. The
natural pigments, the CABUYA, the slow work of the ancient
weaver who silently interprets life growing inside herself,
the nature that surrounds her, her silent work that makes
her unified with the Universe. While I was there, quietly
seated and slowly working, as in a ritual, binding myself
with nature, my expression was evolving more clearly towards
a synthesis of the forest, towards the shaman’s expression
of the sacred branch that I started to insert into glass
cases that freed it from the course of time and that made
it eternal, crystallized in its silent prayer.
Then I dyed the fabrics, with reverence,
with the ancestral techniques and thanking
the indigo, the ochre, the red earth of the blood that for
centuries we have shed and that emerges again from our roots
with the force of love. I was grateful to gold, sacred metal
that I shed among the branches that twist, flow and grow
beyond my fingers towards infinite.
The trellis, as the bushes in nature, broke the crystals
and came out from the urns and are now floating in the space,
creating new contexts, labyrinths and entries
that I can knit with naked hands, in the same way nature
knits the complicated design of her foliages and human beings
the brambles of fear, love and death.
In this way, the structure as well as color acquired, with
time, intrinsic unity, evidencing interior affectivity with
structured rationale. My expression drinks in small sips,
intuitively, from the inca tradition, from the quipus, from
the mantles of Paracas, from the textiles in the graves
of the Bruncas and the Chorotegas … but it also raises
in the search for God, as it is present in the tapestries
of Beauvais or Gobelins.
In the Neo-tapestries, the name I have
given to my work, time and memory, always omnipresent
in the creative process, burst into the manipulation
of the ropes that tell my story, the same story of human
race, blooming, twisting in themselves and producing tender
gems that part from my fingers towards the cosmos with the
pain that is intrinsic to growth.
The textures, emphasized by tri dimensional structures and
color, establish the contrast between nature and culture,
between reason and feeling, between concreteness and spirituality.
The solidity of the interweave is opposed to transparency;
it antagonizes with the background and establishes opposites.
The impact of the form and color of the work from a distance
should be contrasted with the finesse of the material, the
color and the texture of the knots in close proximity.
The process and its components:
the stones, feathers and shells, the knots and the long
threads give tribute to the antique art, exclusive to women,
to knit with the patience of Penelope waiting for Ulysses,
allegory of man in the search of himself but, dazzled, he
lost his center and forgot his roots. As Penelope,
I persevere knitting my warp with the hope that we humans
will some day come back home and then, be one with Universe.
