María García
Maria embarked on a journey through contemporary art, working as a researcher, writer, and curator in diverse locations such as France, Colombia, and England. Over two decades of exploration in North Africa, Indonesia, and India, she encountered Ancestral Art: Primitive Textiles and Ceramics.
These two mediums, sustained by the profound expression of master craftsmen through the extension of mind, heart, and hands, establish a profound connection with ancestral cultural and spiritual literatures. They served as a gateway into the botanical realm, where plants function as medicines of colour, and clay embodies the rhythmic movement of the earth.
The geography of her work orbits around plants, weaving, and ceramics, all influenced by mystical notions and experiences. Circular journeys between Asia and South America dissolve cultural differences, fostering an interaction that unifies distinct places into a singular entity. The symbology, codes, and lines seamlessly merge across space and time.
Maria's textile work encapsulates the energy and medicinal essence of colors derived and prepared from plants, constituting an art form in itself. It preserves the transitional role interwoven into primitive textiles, featuring rectangular woven pieces, immemorial geometries and signs, dreamt of and revealed. The fibers bear a protective, revealing, or amplifying character, infused with codes and literature. Botanical dyes, applied in sequential baths, integrate into figures constructed and incorporated through a timeless printing and textile development process, introducing a third magical or random element into her work. The resulting textile pieces Integrate both past and future, featuring codes influenced by mystical notions and recurring symbologies, bathed in the vibrant hues sourced from the polychrome blood of plants, barks, and roots. Encounters and collaborations with master craftsmen, custodians of highly sophisticated artistic techniques, alongside with the generosity and enchantment of plants have facilitated this seamless integration.
Maria's expertise extends across various primitive textile construction techniques, including Batik, Wood block, Ikat, and others, as well as primitive earth and fire processes in ceramics in Bali and Java (Indonesia), rural Oaxaca (Mexico), and presently in Vaupés and Boya(Colombia) where she lives. She recently has been integrating painting on stone in her practice.
