Rewe Tapestry

2025
Wool (sourced from Chile, partially hand-dyed in a sucrose indigo vat), cotton, copper, clay, burlap, polyester embroidery thread, copper pipe
28 x 25 inches

Exhibited in Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida: A House Containing at Wolfpack HQ (2025).

As I began to research the estates of Luchita Hurtado and Lee Mullican, I was struck by the anecdote of Hurtado and Mullican’s acquisition of a rewe, a Mapuche spiritual item. Mullican and Hurtado lived in Chile in 1968, while Mullican had a teaching grant at the Universidad de Chile. Mullican purchased the rewe from a salesman who traveled to Southern Chile. He shipped the rewe in a “coffin like box” to their home in Santiago before it made its way back to California.

I am interested in the affective, political, and historical dimensions of the buying of the rewe, and the layers of accumulation that sit on top of it. It is the materiality of this object, its conditions, and its markings of life that make it meaningful. Within what might be damage, there is possibility, history, memory, and feeling – a combination of things so rich that they are perhaps best called afterlife.

This tapestry is a weaving, but it is also a collection. Of tourist items — the roving-heavy tapestries or the Pomaire chanchitos commonplace in any Chilean feria artesanal; of text, abstracted and rewoven a la Luchita Hurtado linear language; of copper and locally-sourced wool, materials so central to understanding political violence and centuries of extraction in Chile; and materials partially dyed with a sucrose indigo vat. I wove the items together, over months. It felt similar to the way that items might be extracted, bought, and assembled together in a home. Between the warp, a lot of things became contained.