SEDA
Ceiling installation comprising 10,000 meters of silk threads, six ceramic sculptures and water, eight graphite drawings on handmade paper, and five hand-painted with dye silk paintings.
2023
Seda is a temporary environment in which a world is generated. Recovering ancestral experiences and techniques from Japan, Ruiz-Tagle reflects on the transformations of the environment in the Anthropocene through four axes of work. Ceramic pieces, silk threads dyed with Indian Sappan wood (Caesalpinia sappan) hanging from the gallery ceiling, silk paintings made using techniques from the Edo period of Japanese history (1615-1868), and hand-made paper drawings reproducing the fragmentation of light through vegetation.
Silk, the axis of this interior topology, is a material whose production chain begins with the interaction of species with the environment, as well as the body with its own processes. The overall image is that of the silk worm resting on the mulberry leaf. After ingesting it, it will generate a cocoon with the serum in which it will sleep for weeks until it transforms into a moth.
Silk thread: a material with modest reflectance, slow production, unique, and ethereal existence. Its processing involves multiple stages, each contributing to a final moment: light is a thread that will be akin to every state and organism that approaches it. Due to its organic composition and visual effect, silk is language: distant and pristine, it puts us in contact with the present and the absent, the known and the foreign. With the weight of nothingness and a unique shine, silk is an integral part of an analogy and the relationship between our perception, our bodies, light, and color over time.
Ruiz-Tagle recreates in the drawings, paintings, ceramic pieces, and the intervention of space with silk threads an artificial and momentary environment. In it, emptiness or nothingness takes on the leading role. Like the silence before a stone is thrown into a lake. The proposed topology invites us to contemplate before observing, to live before thinking, to see before acting. In this, the principle of non-action inherent in Zen wisdom becomes evident: space is also everything that is in the invisible.
Text: Teobaldo Lagos Preller