The sample ‘Meditation Pieces’ adds 50 works inspired, in part, by Japanese philosophy. Covers the Kintsugi, Sashiko, Barrocos and Las Hilanderas series.
The kintsugi It is an ancient technique in Japan that consists of repairing broken porcelain pieces with gold. But it has also become a philosophy of life. “The kintsugi comes from a Japanese emperor who breaks a very precious vessel for him. He has it repaired, but it is returned to him with a grotesque arrangement. He replies that the vessel should look prettier after breaking, so he asks to repair it again ”, explains the artist Patricia Meier about that life lesson that inspires part of her work in the exhibition Meditation Pieces, which opened the week before at the Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art (MAAC), located at the north end of the Malecón Simón Bolívar.
“The idea of the kintsugi is that when something breaks we should try to fix it in the most precious way, without hiding the repair … Scars remind us how strong we are,” says Meier, who thus shows his affinity for Eastern philosophy, to which works on sheets of paper that it joins through specific stitches made with gold thread. For this, he uses Nepalese paper and rice paper, which are made by hand with natural fibers, which is why they have a special texture.
The second Japanese technique that Patricia uses is the sashiko, as it is called a traditional decorative sewing that seeks to reinforce garments to extend their useful life or to reuse them.
“I found it nice to work on something that is so relevant today, and I think that something very important in art is relevance,” says the artist about this exhibition, whose curator is Hugo Calle Forest. “We live in a world of extreme consumerism, where we discard everything that is useless, starting with human relationships, affective relationships … All this situation that we live and continue to live (the pandemic) should serve to give us a lesson in life,” he adds Meier.
The stitches in both techniques are very specific and, to perform them, they suggest a moment of introspection and relaxation for the person who performs them. “That served me a lot at this time, since embroidering on paper is so complicated that you have to be very focused, so there is nothing around you that can bother you,” he explains. That is why the name of the exhibition comes, Meditation Pieces.
The exhibition is complemented by the series Baroque, with works that he has been doing with this technique for two decades, which he learned from the artist Walter Páez, who died in 2016. The process is shown through a video and a showcase that exhibits the tools used.
Finally, Patricia Meier includes the series Spinners, Inspired by Greek mythology, through installations with skeins also loaded with symbolism. “Once I was making a ball and I said to myself: how good it feels. It is meditative work, up to a point, and on the other hand all this entanglement also has a lot to do with life. They represent the things that you must put in order. And one also, when something happens, we become a ball … When something bad happens in our lives, we must try to make something good come out of all that. (I)
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