Yesterday I went with Mike and our friend Dalehl to see a couple of fibreart exhibitions I’d been wanting to visit for a few weeks. It was cold but sunny, a perfect day to wrap up and get out for a bit of cultural activity.
First stop was the Spanish Cultural Centre in the Old City to visit an exhibition of paper costumes there, that I’d been humming and hahing over a bit, I think because ‘paper’.., so it wowed me more than I’d been expecting. Textile art friend Felipe whose background is in theatrical costume had mentioned it glowingly, so I shouldn’t have been a bit surprised, and Mike, who’s not always especially interested in these sorties but kindly tags along, commented that it was amazing, which is high praise for someone with his genetic background.
The exhibition comprised several very elaborate C17 ladies’ dresses, copied and produced entirely 100% out of cream and white paper, by students in the final year of their course in theatre costume and design. In pairs they produced paper copies of gorgeous dresses in portraits by of that era painted by prominent artists like Van Dyck et al, … and there were videos showing some of the processes they used to achieve what they did. These costumes were all monochromatic so the viewer would focus on what they achieved in making different kinds of paper look like the fabrics and trims they represented, rather than being distracted by colours and prints. With some it was really hard to believe they were paper, and of course we were really tempted to touch, but didn’t of course.
Downstairs in the centre was another interesting exhibition of prints of flowers, trees and birds that had been created using the cyanotype process with fabrics and paper coated with light sensitive solutions made from ingredients found in any home kitchen or garden. All the prints were in shades of brown from dark cream to almost chocolate brown which formed a very striking array around the white room. Interesting, and because I know virtually nothing about cyanotype images, have never been tempted to join what seems to be a current craze, and I’d always presumed it was only possible to get a result in blues…
Then we moved out to the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Parque Rodó, to see an exhibition of both the woven tapestries and some of the 3D fibreart figures by a national fibrearts icon, Cecilia Brugnini. Very early in my time here in Montevideo someone took me to meet her, and a year or two later I took visiting Australian artist friend Wendy Lugg to meet her, but I can’t claim to actually know her. This exhibition is a lovely retrospective survey of her art rather than containing anything new, but it was wonderful to see a whole group of perhaps 20 woven works hung so we could see their backs too, which often carried interesting textures themselves. These works range in size from 1-2m, and the stitcher in me saw some lovely textures on many of them, and I found the rich colour palettes very 70s-80s in style, some of them featuring touches of glitter – and I just love a bitta glitta. There were also perhaps 8 or 9 plinth-mounted 3D soft sculpture figures, in various sizes up to about 1/5th life size.
We saw several other really interesting exhibitions in the MNAV, too, including one in which a number of artists presented their ideas through works based on the concept and importance of play in the exhibition title Somos Jugando (‘We are Playing) There were a couple of videos on kids playing the hopscotch and leapfrog- which we played when we were very young, and there was a collection of some of the board games we played. All kids love to dress up in adult clothes and pretend to be a grown-up, whatever we wanted to be; and an interesting collection of hanging dress-like objects by Olga Bettas showed how we can present another identity by covering ourselves with something different.
After all that, we needed somewhere warm to have a coffee and sandwich. The MNAV’S coffee shop is nice out under the trees in summer, but we decided to head for the fish market in Buceo for fish and chips at the restaurant there. It was a good choice because without waiting we got a good table inside, and everyone’s fish was lovely. I ordered risotto stuffed moron/capsicum with mine, which reminded me of the potential of stuffing those vegetables, which I really like.
