Cecilia Vicuña On Embracing the Beauty of a Universal Order

Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña approaches her craft with the fervor of a shaman, weaving universal forces into her creations like a cosmic healer. For the Golden Lion winner, art isn’t merely a pastime—it’s an ecstatic pursuit of exploration, a submission to the universe’s whispered suggestions. Her hands become conduits for a creative spark that defies the encroaching darkness. Vicuña’s work is nothing less than a radiant celebration of resistance, a ritual of resilience against destruction. Her art champions the erotics of creation, defiantly rejecting the violence and morbidity that so often define our existence.

Titled “La Migranta Blue Nipple,” her latest exhibition at Lehmann Maupin New York feels like a universe condensed into a gallery space. It’s a lush tapestry of forms and symbols, culled from nature and guided by the artist’s life-long surrender to the collective consciousness. Vicuña taps into an unseen order that connects and governs all things, transforming art-making into a sacred act. Observer spoke with the artist shortly after the show’s opening, where she described how her practice channels the beauty within chaos. Through ritualistic creation, she conjures moments of clairvoyance that embrace the interconnectedness of existence, offering glimmers of hope for a collective reawakening.

This concept of connection—threading all things together—is both literal and symbolic in Vicuña’s work. Weaving, fabric and threads lie at the core of her practice, embodied most powerfully by the quipu. This ancient Andean technology, used for record-keeping and communication, surfaces repeatedly throughout the exhibition. Textiles, Vicuña reminds us, are deeply enmeshed in the progress of civilization. Across cultures and epochs, they have served as secret codes and unifying ties that bind communities together. “The thread is associated with both death and the beginning of life,” the artist explains. “The idea of wrapping the dead in either the woven mat or some woven textile is very ancient in the myths. It’s all about this secret link between the thread of life, the thread of water and the thread of any kind of fiber with a vegetal or animal are one and one symbolizes the other. We learned how to weave from the animals because they’re already weavers.”

Vicuña’s work not only honors ancient traditions but revives their transmission through matriarchal lineage, linking generations of women across time. Through her practice, she breathes life into the ritualistic and spiritual aspects of weaving and textiles, transforming them into tools for community building and reconnection. Although Vicuña learned to knit from her mother, her half-Indigenous heritage and a family history marked by the erasure of ancient traditions under colonial rule meant that it wasn’t until later in life that she encountered the quipu—in a book. This discovery was transformative. From that moment, Vicuña felt as though she had been chosen to preserve and transmit this ancient Andean technique. “Andean people had elaborated the most complex textile technology of the planet,” she notes. The quipu seemed to claim her as its practitioner, inviting her into its vast field of knowledge. “I realized that I was doing it consistently. I didn’t choose it or set out in a program, I just began being part of quipu. The quipu, which is a huge field of knowledge, embraced me and adopted me.”

When the military coup occurred while she was in London, Vicuña’s first response was to create a small sculpture inspired by a quipu. Transient and fragile, this work encapsulated timelessness through its materials and techniques, tethering her to ancestral knowledge. Its ephemeral nature echoed her concept of Arte Precario (precarious art), a philosophy underpinning all her creations. Accepting the fragility of human existence, Arte Precario invites the artist to surrender to the universe and create with whatever minimal objects are at hand. This embrace of precariousness became central to her art, shaped as much by her life’s events as by her creative intent. Many of her early works were lost or destroyed, casualties of the migrations that marked her life. After self-exiling from Santiago de Chile following the violent military coup, Vicuña moved to London and eventually settled in Bogotá, Colombia.

These twin pillars of her poetics—precariousness and interconnection—are the foundation of NAUFraga (2022), a monumental installation occupying an entire room of Lehmann Maupin’s ground floor. Originally conceived for the 2022 Venice Biennale, the work is composed of fragments of organic entities and anthropological creations, suspended and intertwined with the threads of a quipu. Together, they form a constellation that poetically translates humanity’s relationship with the material world while hinting at a transcendental dimension that exists within and beyond physical experience. Anti-monumental and precarious in its construction, NAUFraga is made from ropes and debris scavenged from Venice, creating a haunting tableau of civilization’s ruins. The work critiques the relentless exploitation of the sea and earth, evoking the “shipwreck” of the city itself.

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A poem accompanying the installation encapsulates its themes, declaring that NAUFraga reflects “Our failure to care for Earth.” Poetry is another integral part of Vicuña’s practice, distilling profound insights into the human and planetary condition through metaphoric language. In this instance, the poem becomes a guide to the work’s layered meanings, reflecting on memory, loss and the urgent need for environmental care. “NAUfraga journeys to the memory of the lagoon, its grasses and the stories held by the cords twined by its first people,” it continues. “May the rust of its wings move our hearts to care for Her, our Earth ship.”

Throughout her practice, Vicuña seeks to co-create with nature, treating it as both a collaborator and a guide. For her, nature’s rhythms and cycles reveal the fundamental essence of all art and human creation—a delicate balance within the secret order of creation and destruction. In the summer of 1966, newly accepted into the architecture faculty, she found herself dreaming of architecture as a total art form, one that could transform cities into vast, collective sculptures where everything was art. Sitting on the beach that summer, she experienced a revelation: everything around her—the sea, the sun, the sand—was following a mysterious but profoundly perfect conscious order. “Everything around me was already aware. It was a sort of transfer of consciousness or transfer of awareness,” she recalls.

In that moment of epiphany, she reached for a stick and planted it in the sand. “That, in its essentiality, was already an act of weaving, as the sun is horizontal and the stick is vertical. Weaving is all about crossing that vertical and horizontal structure,” she explains. “To me, that was language itself, the language expressed in space, expressed in life itself.” This small, spontaneous act—a stick in the sand—became the foundation of her entire artistic practice. “It was an offering to the sea because it was the sea that gave me this vision, together with the sun, the movement of the waves, the light itself. I assembled a sort of offering, and then the waves erased it—in that moment, the whole system was born complete.”

From this story, it becomes clear how Vicuña approaches art-making as both a receiver and a transmitter of timeless, ancestral forces and symbols. These symbols, circulating through a collective unconscious, reemerge through the boundless creative potential of human imagination. Even the materials she selects—often fragments of objects at the end of their lives—are chosen intuitively. They are granted a second life, woven into new cycles of creation where their presence is transformed and imbued with fresh symbolic meaning. “The symbol wants to be simple. You don’t have to think of creating a symbol; the symbol creates itself. You let it because it’s in our nature to symbolize,” she says.

Vicuña’s practice is less about creating new forms and more about celebrating the unexpected, epiphanic revelations where human creativity resonates with a deeper, universal order. Her work amplifies and unveils a hidden harmony that extends beyond conventional perception and understanding. This is precisely what her installation Prayer for the Rebirth of Peace in All Lands suggests: a constellation of thirty-four mixed-media objects—precarious, minimal, and essential—crafted from debris and fragments that embody traces of past journeys and stories. These objects, once seemingly lifeless, find renewed meaning and purpose within a new symbolic circle when they encounter the right hands. As Vicuña explains, it is often the objects that choose her, not the other way around. “I’m walking down the street, and I suddenly see a little stick, a piece of metal or a piece of plastic, and I see its beauty. I see where it has come from, a story and an aura.”

From this total surrender to the universe’s offerings emerges Vicuña’s dense, syncretic symbolic vocabulary, which permeates her paintings and drawings. This mystical, almost epic language was shaped in part by her transformative journey through the Amazon—walking from Colombia to Brazil—and forging a profound connection with Indigenous spirituality and knowledge. Among her works, the Orixás figures, deities of the Yoruba religion, hold a prominent place. These female deities, tied to natural elements, evoke a fascinating resonance with other ancestral myths and religions across continents. In the first room of the exhibition, these figures stand not as an army but as a shield, guarding feminine wisdom and sensibility, which she sees as inherently intertwined with the rhythms and cycles of nature.

Interestingly, while the artist also painted some masculine figures for the series, Vicuña notes that once the works were placed in the space, the feminine energies seemed to claim their own unique voice and collective presence. “They wanted to stay together without interference,” she explains. Only one feminine figure is displayed alone: a mermaid, a timeless symbol of mystery and vitality. This aquatic figure—traceable across cultures and civilizations—remains deeply connected to water, the primordial source of life, and the sea, a crossroads of human exchange and transformation.

Not surprisingly, the lone mermaid figure inspired the title of the show, “La Migranta Blue Nipple,” reflecting Vicuña’s lifelong experience of displacement before reconnecting with her roots. At the same time, the title amplifies a broader call for a deeper reconnection—not just with the land, but with the essence of migratory bodies and subjects. It speaks to the continuous transformation and boundless curiosity that have defined humanity since the dawn of civilization, enabling exploration, adaptation and evolution.

These endless possibilities of human creativity and inventiveness inspire hope in Vicuña, even amid the encroaching darkness. As she tells Observer, she believes that a reawakening of human awareness has been unfolding for some time, manifesting as a growing desire to rediscover “alternative forms of knowledge” and to reconnect with the spiritual realms that once characterized humanity’s more genuine, primordial states. “I’m a person of the ‘60s, and this was a time of great awakening of Western culture to discover the beauty and power and the truth of the perception of Indigenous peoples of the world,” she says. “This reawakening had begun with the Romantic poets in the entry, and it went on during the 19th Century. Then, it was really in the 20th Century, especially with surrealist artists and others willing to tap into human consciousness, that a true interest began in what was called, at the time, primitive art. Western art wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for that discovery, but at the time, it was about appropriation,” she adds.

“It was this cross-fertilization that planted the seeds for my generation. Now Indigenous people are starting to be more vocal and have understood the importance of teaching back to the ‘barbarians,’ the ones who championed a belief in violence and death.” Vicuña repeatedly emphasizes how critical this historical moment is: humanity must turn to Indigenous knowledge and messages to counteract the environmental and societal crises deepening around us. She challenges the destructive narrative that evolution requires violence and conflict, advocating instead for a relationship with others—and with the planet—rooted in care, collaboration, and beauty. “Our awareness becomes more splendid, more beautiful, more connected, more explicit sources, and the more we associate with Indigenous people and collaborate with them and so forth,” Vicuña says. “It’s about approaching the field of beauty against the one of violence.”

The poem Prayer for the Rebirth of Peace in Lands, which accompanies the wall installation upstairs, encapsulates this urgent message. Through her art, Vicuña transforms her work into a vehicle for this call to action. “We are at war with ourselves, with each other, and with the land. Peace! she says.”

Cecilia Vicuña: “La Migranta Blue Nipple” is on view at Lehmann Maupin in New York through January 11, 2025.