Bolivian-born textile artist Kenia Almaraz Murillo is rethinking weaving’s traditional reputation with work that zigzags across mediums and references. In her new London art exhibition, Murillo adorns her wall hangings with found, urban objects, from car headlights to motorbike headlamps, brilliantly lit up with curves of neon.
The results are striking, juxtaposing traditional Bolivian materials such as sheep’s and llamas’ wool against the more modern, in a bid to find a balance between the natural and the man-made, the technological and the mythical. It is a tension reflected in the materials themselves, with gold threads from France, dating from the 1920s-1940s, woven with alpaca threads from Bolivia in a mish-mash of textural nods.
