Sofía Alrich Veytia

Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017), was a Polish artist who during the 1960s and 1970s created large, groundbreaking, immersive fiber sculptures. In February 2023 I visited the exhibition “Magdalena Abakanowicz, Every Tangle of Thread and Rope” at the Tate Modern. This exhibition displayed Magdalenas’ Abakans in a forest-like display, reflecting the artist's interest in generating immersive and performative environments with her artwork to create a physical experience for the viewer. Abakonowicz was fascinated with the natural world, she was interested in expressing the powerful and mysterious energies of nature, through figures that oscillate between the figurative and the abstract, the geometric and organic, shapes that are never really defined.

Seeing Magdalena’s Abakans in person was a transformative experience, the sculptures weigh down on you as their scale and heavy material generate the sensation that one is small and fragile in comparison to these structures. This sensation was fascinating as these artworks reference nature which is both beautiful and menacing, and also reference the human body, alluding to wombs or limbs. This relationship between the natural world and the human body is a topic I am currently investigating in my visual practice, so upon seeing how an immersive artwork can convey how both nature and the human body can overwhelm, protect, and support us it sparked an interest for creating artwork that could generate a similar sensation. I reflected upon this in the video “Axis Mundi” which attempts to convey a sensation of discomfort from the viewer at the same time as portraying a fantasy mystical otherworldly experience, using mainly images of trees that resemble elements in the human body at times. 

During April 2023 I took a trip to the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail in Gloucestershire as it had an art piece that I had been longing to see for many years; Cathedral (1986) by Kevin Atherton is a large stained glass sculpture elevated above a trail within the forest. The images within are not particularly religious as they depict the forest in which the sculpture lives, nevertheless the artwork alludes to spirituality as its shape is that of a window in a Cathedral. According to Atherton, the artwork connects two spaces, the ‘forest’ and the ‘cathedral’, light is an element that connects these spaces as they both have a dark interior light and are surrounded by bright light. To properly observe stained glass inside of a Cathedral one must enter it to see the contrasting light, and in the case of this artwork, one must enter the forest to view the window. 

This shows how important the placement of an artwork in a particular space is, how a simple sculpture can be embedded with concepts and background meaning just by immersing it in an environment and using materials that allude to certain topics, in this case, stained glass 

having a tradition of depicting religious scenes. In my current practice, one of my main areas of research is the relationship between nature, man, and spirituality. Often in this research, I struggle to find the correct material that will convey these concepts effectively and innovatively, but upon seeing this artwork in person and also stumbling upon the stained glass window by Thomas Denny in The Chapel of St Thomas, in the Gloucester Cathedral on this same trip, I realized that perhaps experimenting in the future with stained glass might enhance my current practice.

The exhibition Hilma AF Klint and Piet Mondrian Forms of Life at the Tate Modern explores how each artist developed a unique and unconventional abstract language while thinking through nature and the interconnectivity of all forms of life. Within this exhibition, there is a room called the “Ether” named after the concept of an invisible energy that connects the universe. This space explores cultural, scientific, and spiritual contexts relevant to Klint and Mondrian during their lifetimes and also to other artists. 

Artists are always inspired and influenced by the world that surrounds them, but it is not often that one gets to see in the same space the objects and images that shaped the conceptions of the world at the time the artist was developing their ideas. As an artist whose conceptual research is directly related to that of Klint and Mondrian (How to portray imperceptible worlds, the microcosm, and macrocosm depicted through abstract artwork, the spiritual interconnection of all beings, among others.) Seeing charts, illustrations, notes, and books that fed into their practice made me reflect on the power of visualizing and compiling references in a single place, on how artwork can be enhanced by being accompanied by other sources. 

This would be an interesting thing to explore in my art practice, possibly making a compilation of current scientific discoveries, spiritual philosophies, and cultural practices in a visual format, possibly in the form of an artist's book or visual diagram. Sometimes the theories and concepts behind an abstract or conceptual artwork can be difficult to grasp by just looking at the image as all the information that accompanies it is often reduced to fit inside of a label beside the image, in the case of this Tate Modern exhibition the room “Ether” allows the viewer to completely immerse oneself in the context of the artist to better understand the artwork.