Black gauze

Textile body

Big sphere

The smell of horse fills the space, bringing to our minds the animal’s sweat, the path, the agricultural work, and bullfighting on horseback. The works made of mane solidify the sensuality of the animal’s hair into geometrical structures; a material that has the connotation of spirit and physical effort that greatly exceed that of the human being and despite this is tamed for his benefit. As if making an abstraction of the equine use, its hair is transformed into huge containers, bowls and capsular baskets that could hold a person in its perimeter. The proximity of touch is drafted in the sculptural procedures used by the artist, but also in the reference of the textile contact and its use for wrapping the skin, the gauze as a prosthesis of a wounded body and the shelter supplied by the loom’s tight weave.

The specific nature of the works in this exhibition highlights their conclusive appearance and their determined formalism, combined with sobriety and a mysterious aura. Primary descriptions, distancing things from a narration that is external to its constitution and its presence in space. And however, there are common concepts that link the exhibition such as the curiosity regarding the container idea, the craft work as the generator of a new material knowledge, the use of organic materials that at the same time remind you of carnality and disgust.

The pigeon feathers that are usually perceived with dislike are seen here as elements of manual composition, part of the interweaving that enables you to imagine the artist’s fingers playing and knotting the string, feeling the bird’s softness, acknowledging that this is a gift from nature, even if others despise it. The feathers are remnants of a specie that has traversed with us in our development as a society, in such a way that it has been tamed and has adapted to the city environment. However, it is perceived as a plague and a pathogenic agent. By bringing them together with touch, the artist repairs a gap that had been created by repulsion and now creates a feather sequence that is like a new organ, perhaps one of dialog.

Textile thought is always about organization, of looking for ways of transforming matter into structure and opening new ways for the formal knowledge of materials. Vanessa Gómez intends to surpass this possibility, exceeding the frontiers of art, design and handicraft and merging its reach to attain unsuspected goals. By knotting the mane as a hammock or sequencing the feathers as beads, by transforming the horse into a sphere, weaving the pigeon into a path, and unfurling the bean into a grid, the natural fibers are transformed by curiosity until they thin out suggestively and, far from betraying their nature, they find the possibility of asserting themselves from little recognized properties of their substantiality. As unprecedented bodies, this set of things refers to relationships between beings, they arise from the mediation of the artisan with the essence of organic structures that have been related to society since the beginning of time. Gómez’ thoughts are relevant nowadays and arise from primary curiosity, from the relations that we have with other beings and the agreements, motivations, and inquisitiveness that mediate the weave between creatures and the mutual uses.

Curatorial text: William Contreras Alfonso

Curatorship: Daniela Marín Aristizábal