Artist-poet Cecilia Vicuña creates songs, performances, installations, paintings, films, written works, books, lectures, and sculptures. Born in Chile, profoundly impacted by the encouraging time of Allende, the subsequent terrors of Pinochet and decades lived in exile, Vicuña makes work that is always attentive to ethics, the earth, and history. Her object making includes “precarios” - precarious works - composed of fragile materials, (sticks, feathers, leaves, stones, bones…) that disappear, regenerating the life force, and major large-scale installations of “quipus,” dyed wool and fibers inspired by the complex Andean recordkeeping system of sets of knotted cords, a forgotten system she transforms into poems in space,  tactile representations of the interconnectedness between cosmological, natural, and human realms. Her improvisatory, participatory performances, often associated with site-specific installations, emphasize the collective nature of action and creativity to bring forth justice, balance and transformation of the world.

Photo by Moira Roth, Sydney Biennale 2012