Beatriz Morales ART Magazine feature

FIBERLAND

Huge quantities of hair spill from the wall in large tufts, suspended like some kind of fur of a recently hunted animal. Cascades of textile, some felty like the pelt of a monster, some fluffy like sheep’s wool, some like wigs made of horse hair, almost human. The fibers hang heavily, in thick knots or slender braids, dyed in earthen tone and bright pinks, in woolly beige or a bright white, like clouds on the horizon. Beatriz Morales puts the entire spectrum of textures to play in her large-scale works, yet she derives these landscapes of the soul from a single, simple raw material; one that is deeply woven into the history of her native country Mexico: the agave fiber. “Back in the day, the agave fiber was called ‘green gold”, says Morales, whom we meet in her studio in Berlin-Schöneberg, where fibers are stacked from floor to ceiling in transparent crates, carefully sorted and arranged by color. It is here in Berlin that the artist, who was born in 1981 in Mexico City, works when she is not creating in her expansive studio in the Federal State of Hidalgo, not far from the Mexican capital.

In the 19th century, entire branches of industry were based on the plant, which was already held in high regard by the Mayas. While the so-called heart of the plant is used for the production of Mezcal and Tequila, the leaves of the agave, which frequently grow to a length of two meters and more, yield robust fibers called sisal, or, natively, henequén. Traditionally, the fiber was used for the production of shipping ropes and transport sacks – key products in the early stages of globalization. With the advent of synthetic fibers, however, these organic materials were increasingly sidelined. The henequén industry, once a governing factor with gigantic monocultures on the Yucatán peninsula, exists only in small remnants today. While sisal remains an important raw material, it is now increasingly cultivated on the African continent, where it was introduced by German colonists at the turn of the last century, or else is grown in China.

In Morales’ view, this is tragic: “We had the plant in front of our eyes all this time, and yet it has become invisible to us. Even in the art it has seen very little use.” About five years ago, when she discovered the material for a large installation project at the MACAY in Mérida, Mexico, Morales, who initially began as a painter, transformed into an artist-researcher. She fights against the forces of oblivion, investigates, experiments and weaves the knowledge she extracts into huge, suggestive wall- hangings, which tell the complex story of the material they consist of, speak of ancient traditions and pre-Columbian knowledge, of the decline of an industry, and the material’s creative renaissance. In her shapes and powerful colors – Morales dyes her fibers and textiles using natural, mostly plant-based ingredients – she processes personal experiences, the landscapes she is surrounded by and the energy of Mexico as a whole.

Whether through science or technique: preserving ancient knowledge is a crucial component of the process.

“Since I started using agave, my process has changed completely. When painting, I am used to working on my own at my studio. Working with fibers, however, means working with an entire community.” This is true not only for the preparation and initial processing of the fiber, which she receives as tightly packed bundles. When she started engaging with the manifold dyeing processes and techniques, it became apparent to the artist that she needed to leave the studio and extend her reach.

The traditional dyeing techniques she uses are recipes and processes that are sometimes millennia old and have been handed down orally from one master of an indigenous community to another. It is knowledge that is not readily available, and neither is it meant to be openly accessible. “I was able to find one of the very few master dyers. But it took years before he would start to teach me.”To enter this world, one needs to establish genuine trust. “I’m sure he kept many secrets to himself”, Morales laughs.

The dyeing process is central in the artist’s oeuvre. It transforms the beige raw fiber into an entire color palette for her art, sublimates the profane material and charges it with new layers of meaning. It is a process that can become a tour de force: while the final works often look soft and fluffy, the fiber itself is brittle and unruly, feels hard, strawy and scratchy to the touch. The same characteristics that made the material so ideal for agricultural and industrial use pose a challenge to fine artistic processing. The agave is boiled in large pots over open fire together with hand-ground pigments, until the plant eventually absorbs the color. The brilliant straw-yellow is made with the plant pericón, various shades of red ranging from earthy to clear are produced with a wood called Palo de Brazil or won from Grana Cochinilla, a species of insects that are dried and ground in the process.

Individual shades and nuances are calibrated with additional ingredients like various kinds of salts or lemon. Creating blue involves the most complex process of all: the indigo-plant is submerged in large pools of water for weeks, where the resulting liquid is increasingly deprived of oxygen, until, once drained and dried, the pigments can be extracted as compact stones of pure color. The process involves various stages of fermentation, resulting in a stench which subsequently needs to be aired from the dyed fiber over extensive periods before the material can be used. The production of these blue pigments, too, now rests in the hands of only a few remaining families in Mexico. Experience with these fickle and complicated processes has taught Morales one thing: You cannot force anything. “The results are often not exactly like the initial idea, the process itself sets an organic rhythm which I follow. This is precisely what makes working with natural elements and artisanal, manual techniques so interesting” – and what gives the artworks a special depth.

Giant cascades of fiber, reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism and baroque history paintings.

For Morales, who was born to a Mexican mother and Lebanese father and later relocated to Europe to study fashion design before moving into fine art early in her life, working with agave fiber is a return to her own origins. “I grew up in my father’s small textile factory in Mexico City. From my earliest childhood, textiles were an important part of my life. That said, when I came to Berlin, I branched out in my interests and focused, for example, on architecture, history, the many layers of color on the walls of the buildings in that city.”

Morales integrated this strand of investigation into her series Ruin Porn, in which she applies many layers of color onto canvases to then compose works by scraping and scratching those layered surfaces, revealing what’s hidden. Her investigative focus on colors and history also brought her to Lebanon: “I went to Beirut with the goal to find out everything I could about the color purple, for which the area was historically renowned. But after decades of civil war the traditional knowledge seems to be almost lost there.” The sojourn nevertheless proved fruitful for another project: “I recently finished a large commissioned work, in which I used primarily red and purple tones. While I started preparing my palette I found out that there remains one single family in Mexico who extracts purple pigments in the traditional way from snails – this is the pigment I ended up using.” A surprising bridge between Mexico and Lebanon, and also between Morales’ Lebanese heritage and Mexican roots.

The notion of origin is, of course, an important one. “I never wanted to be the Mexican woman painting brightly colored paintings. But when I started to rediscover my home country after I had already lived abroad for many years, I realized that I was able to see my own home with different eyes.”
That said, the traditional forms and techniques do not exert too much influence on Morales: “I would not say that I am following a tradition. Rather, I pick up traditional strands, in the truest sense of the word, and weave those into artworks that may incorporate traditional elements, but that ultimately fully unfold in the here and now.” When weaving or knotting, Morales does not strictly adhere to traditional patterns: “I actually work with agave just like I do with paint and brush”, intuitively, spontaneously, gesturally. “I see the cascading fibers like three-dimensional brushstrokes that expand into the room.” Her huge formats and color palettes conjure up associations of baroque history paintings, are reminiscent of the gestural color fields that characterize the Abstract Expressionism rooted in the USA.

Ultimately, it is the sum total of experiences, of all facets of her own identity between Lebanon, Mexico and Berlin, that come together in the tapestry of Morales’ work. In her series Sounds I’ll Never Hear she draws on her family history, creates subtle, sometimes barely visible, tender color shapes that enter a dance with embroidered lines in an allusion to imaginary dialogues, as if approaching ghosts. A thin girly braid among shaggy tufts of fiber in Tecuani I seems to call up images of the artist’s own childhood.
And of course, Mexico, the surroundings of her idyllic studio, the wide Mexican landscape all remain abundant sources of inspiration. In the case of her installation Kihaab, which measures roughly nine by ten meters and was shown in 2020 at the MACAY, the composition was influenced by the shadows the surrounding trees threw on her textiles as she worked in the open air. Other works seem to mirror the black night sky, others again appear like maps with serpentine rivulets and mountain ranges, boundless growth or geological deserts. And time after time, Mexican mythology provides inspiration as well.

With Kaan, an installation consisting mainly of layers and layers of dried acrylic color that are draped around a scaffolding like a version of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl. Mythology also shines through when Morales names artworks using words from the languages of Latin Americas early indigenous high civilizations. A series of large, fibrous works is called Ts’ul, a Maya word for “foreigner. Another is named Tecuani, the Aztec word for “wild animal”. It is telling that it is mostly the agave works in Morales’ oeuvre that she names using pre-Columbian words.

Yet another thread tying together the artist’s practice is the importance of architecture and environment. It can be a simple column in a room, as in the case of KUNSTVEREIN DRESDEN, where Morales will soon open a solo exhibition. The architectural element is interpreted as a tree, and integrated as such into the exhibition, providing a trunk for branches of textile and fiber that grow into the room. For another presentation close to Chicago, the structure of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s EDITH FARNSWORTH HOUSE will be a worthy partner for Morales’ monsters. “I always take in the room first, I try to envision it as a habitat. What belongs in this space, what lives here?”

In the end, thus, art and life share the same essence: lose strands tied into contacts, one’s own existence, interwoven into one’s environment, human connection. From that point of view, giving back to the community one owes so much is a natural notion. “When I showed my first large fiber work at the MACAY, the locals were genuinely proud”, says Morales. “They had never seen the agave plant quite like this before.”