María Nepomuceno

The exhibition space that hosts Always in a Spiral, the artist’s second European solo show, has been transformed into a garden, an organic array comprised of different compositions that maintain the uniformity that is sometimes an attribute of nature. The installation comprises several works made of fiber rope and beads that take on spiral forms metaphors for the body and nature, for the umbilical cord that represents a connection with new life. Nepomuceno’s work also relies on the image of the hammock, which in many Amerindian cultures is a place of sleep, birth and death. Many of her hammocks are reminiscent of uteri and they contain beads some of them one of a kind and of great dimensions, others insignificant except when grouped together which may be perceived as the fruit of the womb. Inspired by traditional hammocks originally made from vegetable fibers, Nepomuceno also resorts to traditional materi- als, avoiding the use of synthetic ones another wink at nature, inseparable from the anthropological and cultural origins to which she makes reference.

But the artist goes even farther and explores the materialization of the organic as an intrinsic quality of nature and of living beings, in such a way that this concept acquires a decisive importance in her work. Every time she exhibits, María Nepomuceno reassembles her sculptures, incorporating them in each other or taking them apart, or modifying certain aspects and shapes. Thus, through this action that we might consider a performative one, and that is so characteristic of mankind, the artist transforms her works into project-specific pieces and resumes the refer- ence that the spirals or the ropes from which these changes originate are, from the point of view of birth, a fertile point and a possible beginning for new proposals.