joseph scissorhands: Olga de Amaral

Saturday 29 October 2022

Olga de Amaral

Olga de Amaral - Strata XV, 2009 (detail)

"I find that the knot is the beginning of everything. Everything is accidental to me. An accident becomes a work." - Olga de Amaral.

Another lovely new discovery this, of the weavings of renowned Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, at what is her first London show in a decade. The work here feeds into my current artistic interests and relates very nicely to the works of other creators in the art/craft/textile fields also discovered by myself earlier this year by makers such as Lenore Tawney (here), and Peter Collingwood (here). As with these two, de Amaral's work sits comfortably between the fibre art and fine art divide. This exhibition contains important pieces in the development of her oeuvre from the 1960s to the present and they are just mesmerisingly beautiful with lustrous surfaces that shimmer to reflect and refract the light. The surfaces of some of the pieces were really surprising as the technical way in which they are woven closely resemble the composition of the microscopic, irridescent scales and plates which comprise the surfaces of butterfly wings. The comparison was really uncanny. In other pieces the surfaces are comprised of worked, massed tangles of finer, pigmented threads creating wonderfully tactile surface textures. As I work with so much gold leaf, the pieces in which de Amaral worked into and similarly coated the surfaces with gold leaf really resonated with me. Strata XV, impressed me enormously. I was transfixed by the play of light creating movement across its surface. It actually seemed to ripple as my eyes passed over the buckled surface, and it appeared to crumple under its own weight. It brought to mind the equally gorgeous 'metal cloths' of woven gold bottle tops created by Ghanaian sculptur El Anatsui (here). Another personal highlight for me was the early piece Luz Blanca, a frothing, ethereal, cascading concoction of layered polythene which reflected the light and again appeared to move and glow in its absorption and reflection of the light. Olga de Amaral's spectacular weavings are wonderful things. I am so glad to have made their acquaintance.