Rival paramilitary groups have fought for control of Tierralta, Colombia, through much of its history. The violence intensified in the 1970s after coca traffickers began establishing hideouts within nearby mountain ranges.
Delcy Morelos grew up in Tierralta with her grandmother, a descendent of the Emberá, a people indigenous to Colombia and Panama. Morelos lived for a time in a mud hut, carefully moistening it daily so it wouldn’t get too dusty. In those days she developed a lifelong knack for weaving her own clothes.
Morelos, 57, developed a deep concern about violence, an appreciation for the natural world and an abiding connection to textiles. She’s woven those themes through decades of paintings, sculpture and large-scale, soil-based installations.
For the first time at a U.S. exhibition, visitors can trace those themes through a selection of her older work seen alongside a site-specific installation of the sort that has won her international renown over the past decade.
“Interwoven,” the artist’s exhibition at Pulitzer Arts Foundation, is on view through Aug. 4. She’s been commissioned to create site-specific installations in recent years for high-profile events including the 2022 Vienna Biennial, and her first solo show in the U.S. is on view at a New York gallery through July.
This is her second and the first to exhibit some of Morelos' key older work alongside a site-specific piece.
“I believe that the disconnection that makes us be violent with each other is the same disconnection that makes us be violent with nature and with the landscape,” Morelos said on a recent morning in St. Louis. She spoke through translator Karla Aguilar Velásquez, a museum educator and gallery curator.
Locally sourced materials, universally relevant message
The centerpiece of “Interwoven” is a work that required dozens of sections of metal fence and three tons of St. Louis soil. “Earthly Weaving” also incorporates fragrant bits of cinnamon, cloves and thyme — and buckets of red brick dust, sourced locally.
Studio assistants under her direction spent two months in a nondescript workspace nearby on Locust Street, carefully mixing local dirt with the other ingredients and water. They fashioned three-inch clumps of mud and arranged them in careful rows on the fence sections. Days before the show opened, they were still painting a clear, acrylic binding agent onto the clumps of mud to hold them in place.
The installation now fills most of the largest gallery at Pulitzer Arts Center, creating a sort of maze that visitors walk through. The spices in the soil create a sweet smell, while a subtle red tint from the brick dust suggests blood, or iron oxide found in the earth.
The desired effect is not so much a thought process as a feeling, she added.
“I actually don't want visitors to think when they are walking inside my installations. I want them to feel, and I want them to notice that all of us humans are made of the same material that the land and the soil are made of. That's the type of connection that I want to encourage,” Morelos said.
The work is open to multiple interpretations. Fences are a statement of ownership over physical space, but the overriding presence of soil here seems to call this one’s authority into question. Morelos said the soil is the color of her grandmother’s skin and drew a comparison between a loving embrace and the sense of belonging within nature.
'Part of a thread'
Visitors can go straight from a walk around and through “Earthly Weaving” to adjacent galleries with older works highlighting similar themes.
The swirling, abstract painting “Concentrated Fields (Espacios Concentrados)” is rendered in shades of red acrylic and could be an overhead view of the Andres Mountains, which divide Colombia into adjacent but differing ecosystems. A closer look reveals that Morelos created the image with individual dots of color, suggesting the impact made by bloody conflict on individual people.
“In the Personal Plot (En la trama personal),” another acrylic painting, rectangular grids appear to be a closeup view of woven textiles. Its shades of pink and crimson evoke blood and human tissue.
“Weaving really is a central framework around which this exhibition has come together,” said Pulitzer curator Tamara Schenkenberg, who organized the show. “It’s a motif but also a metaphor that expresses her worldview, which posits that everything is interwoven. We’re all part of a larger fabric.”
The exhibition also includes ink and watercolor drawings, other works incorporating soil and pieces made from painted layers of cotton thread. Seen together, Morelos’ works suggest different pieces of an ongoing conversation. Even when the artist’s intent is ambiguous, the pieces are heavy with feeling.
“I think there's a language that goes beyond words. It’s the emotion that we feel when we are in presence of a sunset, or when we smell the soil after a rain,” Morelos said. “Those are the sort of emotions that I want to celebrate in these exhibitions.”
