In her tapestry works images of different roots and plants are woven together on a large piece of wool, willfully grafted and interlaced in a forced embrace. For Serrano Rivas, gestures of layering and translation are necessary architectural interventions to rewild the voice of nature. She employs the ancient Spanish rural tradition of weaving and in the form of a tapestry dyed with natural pigments, she allows the process of the plants’ metamorphosis to unravel. Suspended in front of the window, both sides of the weave remain visible, revealing how warp and weft, like us and our vegetable kin, interpenetrate and compose each other’s habitat.
The threads remain porous. They dance down the tapestry, like how the bonds between the works figuratively meander and adjoin across the space. They seem to say: Life is a movement of possibility, of connection, of cascading, of becoming. Everything was and is the same life.
“Patrones de Ritmo” examines bodies of water and their ecosystems simultaneously from a macro and micro perspective. Based on a project Serrano Rivas was commissioned to create by TBA21 for the Venice lagoon, it attempts to recreate the vastness of the lagoon in a small bowl. Serrano Rivas draws here on a Renaissance theory by Athanasius Kircher, according to which, to understand a system, one has to recreate it on a micro level. This model was then filmed by Serrano Rivas, and from this film she took stills, which she transformed into Jacquard tapestries.
Each colour is coded in a specific stitch; together, the weaving forms an iridescent and mesmerising surface, reminiscent of water.