Paulina Ortiz in her own words

In the USA, while I was studying there, I had the opportunity to work with the best of technology to express myself in the language of the big metropolis: I could prolong my search through the same ways that the other contemporary artists used…but something inside me remained empty. There was a real need to go back to the land, to the human values of the beginning of times, back to communion with archetypal materials.

My expression had to keep the scent of the forest, its textures, its sensations, its noises…all these contours which, by vocation is still intact inside of me.

The arboreal elements became extensions of my own body that evolved in concepts very tightly bound to my maternity and the joys and fears that pregnancy produced in me. The natural pigments, the CABUYA, the slow work of the ancient weaver who silently interprets life growing inside herself, the nature that surrounds her, her silent work that makes her unified with the Universe. While I was there, quietly seated and slowly working, as in a ritual, binding myself with nature, my expression was evolving more clearly towards a synthesis of the forest, towards the shaman’s expression of the sacred branch that I started to insert into glass cases that freed it from the course of time and that made it eternal, crystallized in its silent prayer.

Then I dyed the fabrics, with reverence, with the ancestral techniques and thanking the indigo, the ochre, the red earth of the blood that for centuries we have shed and that emerges again from our roots with the force of love. I was grateful to gold, sacred metal that I shed among the branches that twist, flow and grow beyond my fingers towards infinite.

The trellis, as the bushes in nature, broke the crystals and came out from the urns and are now floating in the space, creating new contexts, labyrinths and entries that I can knit with naked hands, in the same way nature knits the complicated design of her foliages and human beings the brambles of fear, love and death.

In this way, the structure as well as color acquired, with time, intrinsic unity, evidencing interior affectivity with structured rationale. My expression drinks in small sips, intuitively, from the inca tradition, from the quipus, from the mantles of Paracas, from the textiles in the graves of the Bruncas and the Chorotegas … but it also raises in the search for God, as it is present in the tapestries of Beauvais or Gobelins.

In the Neo-tapestries, the name I have given to my work, time and memory, always omnipresent in the creative process, burst into the manipulation of the ropes that tell my story, the same story of human race, blooming, twisting in themselves and producing tender gems that part from my fingers towards the cosmos with the pain that is intrinsic to growth.
The textures, emphasized by tri dimensional structures and color, establish the contrast between nature and culture, between reason and feeling, between concreteness and spirituality. The solidity of the interweave is opposed to transparency; it antagonizes with the background and establishes opposites. The impact of the form and color of the work from a distance should be contrasted with the finesse of the material, the color and the texture of the knots in close proximity.