This week, Year 3 and 4 classes set off on a fabulous art adventure, which took them to the Tate Modern to see the “BRAIN FOREST QUIPU” created by Chilean artist and poet “Cecilia Vicuña”.
Cecilia Vicuña’s Brain Forest Quipu is a multi-part installation made up of sculpture, sound, music and video. The quipu is an ancient South American recording and communication system made from knotted threads. Vicuña has been exploring and transforming the quipu in her work for over five decades.
Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile. Her work is noted for themes of language, memory, dissolution, extinction and exile. Critics also note the relevance of her work to the politics of ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless. Her commitment to feminist forms and methodologies is considered to be a unifying theme across her diverse body of work, among which quipus, palabrarmas and precarious stand out. Her practice has been specifically linked to the term eco-feminism.
Cecilia Vicuña was distinguished with Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas 2019, Spain’s most prominent art award and given out by the Spanish Ministry of Culture to an artist based in the country or from the Ibero-American Community of Nations. The jury statement said that she is receiving the award for her “outstanding work as a poet, visual artist and activist” and her “multidimensional art that interacts with the earth, written language, and weaving.”.
At the centre of “Brain Forest Quipu” are two sculptures that hang 27 metres from the ceiling. They are woven together using a range of organic materials, including found objects, unspun wool, plant fibres, rope and cardboard to evoke the look of bleached-out trees and ghostly forms.
The children made some sketches of some of the elements of this incredible exhibit, which you can see in the gallery below.