Tejido conectivo

Throughout her career, Luz Lizarazo (b. Bogotá, Colombia, 1966) has explored the poetic, political, and spiritual significance of the female form in drawings, paintings, textiles, and sculptures. She has worked with traditional sculpture materials including wood, glass, and ceramics, as well as biomaterials and fibres including bone, wool, and human hair. In many of her two-dimensional works, figures are depicted alongside - at times, merged with - animals and landscapes in compositions which embed the human in the natural world. In her three-dimensional works, Lizarazo examines our relationship to the outside more closely in abstract sculptures which foreground the body as a living organism. By isolating the body’s internal and external organs, Lizarazo focusses intimately on the physical and symbolic boundaries which mediate its encounter with nature.

In a series titled Piel, or Skin, Lizarazo uses nylon tights to represent the body’s largest organ and outermost layer. In the artist’s own words, skin is the “tissue that envelops and transforms us.” 1 One of the works in the Piel series is Tejido Conectivo, a large wall-hanging constructed from small quadrilateral sections of different skin-coloured tights. The small sections are joined together in a lattice structure and form a larger fabric. The fabric is displayed stretched out and pinned to the wall by its four corners. The installation of Tejido Conectivo conveys skin’s essential elasticity, while its construction from small components communicate its cellular form. The work operates as a visual enlargement of the layer separating the body from the outside world, a material which gives shape to life and contains the body’s inner life forces. In doing so, it conveys the artist’s marked interest in the body as a vessel for life and consciousness, as well as her spiritual concern with the limits of inner and outer experience.

1 https://www.casasriegner.com/blog-en_ca/luz-lizarazo-joins-the-collection-of-the-museo-reina-

sofía-with-her-work-piel-extendida-