Uirapuru - new tapestry work

I am pleased to unveil my new tapestry, Uirapurú. The Uirapurú is a bird (the musician wren of Amazonia) and one of Brazil’s most mythologized presences. Barely twelve centimetres long, it sings for only a handful of mornings each year, and in indigenous Tupi-Guaraní oral tradition, the forest itself falls silent when it does. The legend behind it is one of transformation through impossible love: a young man expelled from his tribe, heard by the god Tupã, and returned to the world as pure song. The maestro Villa-Lobos made it the subject of one of his most luminous orchestral works. Researchers have since found uncanny structural parallels between its melody and passages in Bach and Haydn.

The bird exists at the threshold between the natural and the mythic, a little creature that indigenous communities continue to regard as a messenger between worlds, its rarity only deepening its power.

This tapestry is my close, intimate encounter with the presence of the forest in its dense wool pile, the way the surface holds and releases light, the depth of its texture… all inviting to be approached slowly and at close range, with the hands as much as the eyes. Sound and music are also central to how this work developed: rhythm, frequency, and silence within Villa Lobo’s orchestral work informs the textures and the material choices as much as any visual reference.

This piece is therefore a fluid response to all the above… the sensorial and sensual landscapes and architecture of Brazil where I come from, but also the heritage and culture of the Middle East where I used to live, and the arazzo traditions from Sicily where I now live and work.

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Uirapurú

Wool and cotton tapestry, 130x185cm

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