In fashion, designers choose the softest and most luxurious fabrics to create extraordinary pieces. But, in art, you don't necessarily need to pick luxurious materials to come up with unique works: Mexican artist Aurora Pellizzi used, for example, as a base for her textile canvases part of the "Geometric Daydreaming" series, industrial felt. In this case, she "painted" with hand-felted naturally dyed wool on the thick grey felt.
As a background for her "Transfiguration" series, Pellizzi employed recycled ayate panels made of maguey or agave fibers, hand threaded and hand woven (the most famous ayate is the one where the Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have miraculously appeared in 1531).
The textiles were originally used to carry firewood and corn in the countryside in Mexico. The coarse and sturdy fabric turned in Pellizzi's practice into the perfect base on which the artist latch-hooked or wove three-dimensional images with wool that she naturally hand-dyed in her studio.
One important thing to note is that Pellizzi dyes and prepares her own materials using exclusively natural pigments. So the chocolate brown in her artworks is made with pomegranate rinds fermented with iron, while brighter shades such as yellow and orange are made with Aztec marigold. Pellizzi also uses Brazilwood, indigo, avocado pits, cochineal and pericón (a ceremonial flower) for her colour palette.
The wall-hangings are conceived as textural paintings representing parts of the human body, often reduced to geometrical shapes. A pubis is a triangle, breasts form perfect circles or three-dimensional spheres, and, in some cases, the human body turns into a sensual landscape, with breasts forming boulders and mountains and legs depressions and valleys.
These geometrical forms and landscapes hint at an uninhibited femininity, at feminine sensuality and female power, while they also combine the textile traditions of Mexico with modern art and with a communal identity as the artist makes her pieces with a cooperative of women embroiderers from the Otomí ethnic group in Temoaya.
The tapestries forming the "Transfiguration" series were also turned into colourful prints made with rice-based ink and collected in a book published by the independently run Can Can Press.
You can bet Pellizzi will at some point collaborate with a fashion house for her aesthetic, her well-balanced colour palette and her hand-woven/hand-dyed techniques (a while back she did a series of friendship bracelets with names of fashion houses that could be considered as a compact fashion installation per se View this photo).
In the meantime, her pieces from the "Transformation" series are currently part of the exhibition "El deseo aparece de repente" (Desire Appears Suddenly, until 15th July) at the Instituto de Visión in Bogotá, Colombia.
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