BETWEEN EARTH AND CONCRETE: DELCY MORELOS EXHIBITS IN LONDON

This Wednesday, the Barbican Centre unveiled Origo, the first public artwork in the United Kingdom by Colombian artist Delcy Morelos, on view through July 31. The project engages with the complex’s iconic concrete architecture while extending its visual arts commissioning program beyond traditional gallery spaces.

Morelos’s practice draws on Andean worldviews alongside the aesthetics of Minimalism and Abstraction. Her work reflects on the relationship between bodies and the earth. Born in 1967 in Tierralta, Córdoba—a region deeply affected by armed conflict linked to land dispossession and large-scale mining—she began by creating paintings with red clay pigments, exploring the connections between territory, violence, and the body. Since then, her work has consistently approached the earth not as a resource, but as a living agent with which humans form a symbiotic relationship.

Building on her research into soil and plant matter, Morelos developed monumental installations designed to be experienced immersively. Handcrafted from clay, earth, hay, and seeds, these works incorporate spices such as cinnamon and cloves, whose antifungal properties help preserve the material. Combined with the damp scent of soil, these elements create a sensory environment that evokes memory and encourages a more ethical relationship with what the artist calls the “mother of all materials.”

Origo establishes a counterpoint with the Barbican through both form and material. The complex’s concrete surfaces, marked by traces of human labor, evoke both the devastation of the Blitz and the social ideals of the postwar period. Influenced by Le Corbusier, the Barbican was conceived in 1959 by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon as a “city within a city,” integrating housing, culture, and public space.

Installed in the Sculpture Court—reactivated for the first time in a decade—the work is Morelos’s most ambitious to date. Rising over three meters high and formed as an oval structure with multiple access points, its porous topography contrasts with the rigidity of its surroundings. Earth-lined tunnels invite visitors to move through the interior and to consider forms of coexistence beyond the human, in relation to the microscopic life within the soil.

The installation encourages visitors to circle, enter, and inhabit this earthen body, where light, scent, and texture shape an immersive experience.