It was 1973, and Cecilia Vicuña was in London, on a scholarship at Slade School of Fine Art, when the news broke. A CIA-backed military coup had overthrown the government in her native Chile, ousting Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist administration and bringing General Augusto Pinochet to power.
Information came through to the young artist slowly, in painful pieces. Her father had lost his job, a former classmate had been tortured, her uncle became one of the more than 1,000 disappeared. Paintings were lost, murals painted over, books burned.
“If we are to be made into litter and castoffs, then fine,” she would write to a friend some years later. “I am garbage and a castoff, and that is my language – the exploded fragment.”
Half a century on, gatherings of garbage and other fragments are made hauntingly extraordinary in the halls of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in Dublin. Loss lingers, mingled with flashes of brave joy.
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There are nubs of spent pencils, twigs, seeds, fabric scraps, a huge hanging of native Irish wool, pieces of poetry, paintings, film and the sound of the artist’s unique voice mingled with bird song. Collectively it feels analogous with Vicuña’s own realisation, 50 years ago, that there is always hope; that within the small, the forgotten, lie the seeds of change. In 1974 she cofounded Artists for Democracy and held a solo show, Precarios: A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance, in London.
In one room at Imma, Vicuña invites visitors to write a wish for peace. She is not the first artist to do so. It is a theme that threads through the work of Yoko Ono, whose own Wishing Tree was installed at the former Ormeau Baths Gallery, in Belfast, albeit a generation ago, in 1989. “People can write down their wishes, and hang them from the branches. Together we can wish for a better life,” Ono said at the time.
Yet, clearly, wars and displacements continue, devastatingly unabated. So is it naive to believe in the possibility that humanity might tend towards peace? If the answer is yes, why bother with anything at all? Vicuña, who includes poetry, performance and activism within her art, coined the term “arte precario” (precarious art). The opposite of monuments, these pieces encapsulate the fragility of life and hope.
Vicuña is dedicated to her artistic task with a sincerity that is initially difficult to meet – cynicism doesn’t work with her, or with her work. Raw and earnest sincerity can be hard to take, not least because it holds up an uncomfortable mirror to the lies we tell ourselves about the inevitability of inequality, about the flaws in our political and social systems, and about what we would each have to give up to make a better world.
Vicuña is possibly best known for her quipus, installations based on a pre-Columbian system of communication, made from knotted cords, among the Inca and other Andean cultures. In its gestural aesthetic it reminds me of our own ogham, and Vicuña’s expressive eyes light up when I introduce her to the idea of that language and its association with trees.
From 1583 on, quipus were outlawed and destroyed by the Spanish colonists, and few intact examples remain. Now without context, the meaning of the language has been lost.
But, although the literal translation may be gone, the world view that created it has not. At Imma it is present in echoes in two quipus made for the museum’s long corridor halls. Foraging Quipu is a maze of twigs, plants and bits and pieces hanging on near-invisible strings, made precious, with flashes of unexpected beauty, by the artist’s eye. Aran Quipu has been made from cascades of Irish wool from the pioneering farmer-run co-operative dedicated to preserving the native Galway breed of sheep.
“Wool is eternal,” Vicuña says in the quiet voice common to so many who are utterly confident in their inner power. Earlier she told me that I would have to shift the way I was sitting to hear her properly. “My voice is very low. It is unconscious; it is not on purpose.” Such is her delivery that it seems like a wonderful invitation rather than a vaguely uncomfortable inconvenience. “Wool has so many transformations that are possible from it. It cleans the ocean that has been soiled by oil. It seeks, soaks up the contaminants from soil,” she says with a sense of wonder.
Aran Quipu is initially somewhat lost in Imma’s long gallery, but it grows in power up close. There are no knots. How can it be a quipu without them? The thought teases you with its presence of absence until you realise that’s exactly the point. Just as with her Disappeared Quipu, at Brooklyn Museum in 2019, these hangings are the equivalent of a blank page, a silence echoing across time with the loss of a people, their civilisation, their language and the records of their thought.
If you’re more used to having your eyes and mind saturated with shouty art, it can take a while for the calmer strength of Vicuña’s work to gather its impact. Something similar happened at Tate Modern in 2022, with her Brain Forest Quipu, described at the time, by the critic Adrian Searle, as the most moving Tate Turbine Hall installation for years.
In 2022 she received a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale. She was 74, and art-world superstardom had taken its time to arrive, but she is brilliantly unafflicted by any notion of gratitude. At a celebratory dinner in Venice she told her august assembled company, “All the exhibitions I’m doing for you are concerned with the magnificent movement to divest. Because I don’t think we are given more time.” The Guggenheim family, she noted in an interview at the time, once owned nitrate mines in Chile.
The depth and scope of the Imma show are down to Vicuña’s Irish roots. Her partner, the American poet James O’Hern, had given her a present of a DNA test, and the pair discovered a shared Northern Irish heritage. That it dates to about 12,000 years ago is immaterial to her, because Vicuña regards time as fluid rather than linear, a discovery she made while studying architecture.
“One day I am attending class and I had a dream, a very extraordinary dream. I am watching the blackboard, full of equations. Suddenly the professor looks at me because he could see that I was thinking of something else. And I said, ‘Sorry, I just had a realisation that time does not exist.’”
That was the end of her architecture schooling.
Vicuña, who now divides her time between Santiago and New York, has since then attributed some of her ideas to moments of revelation, such as her “palabrarmas” (word weapon) paintings and drawings, which came to her in the 1970s, while she was on a trip to the Amazon rainforest.
“There are certain things you feel as if it were commands. But where are these commands coming from? They’re coming from your soul, from some form of inner knowledge that is probably ancestral, or comes from the future. Many philosophers think that information comes from the future,” she says. I am reminded of The Order of Time, the very beautiful book by the quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli, from 2017. Like Vicuña, it is mind-blowing in all the best ways.
[ Where physics and philosophy meet: John Banville reviews The Order of TimeOpens in new window ]
Vicuña met O’Hern in 2004. “It was a song about a deer that brought us together. We began a conversation and we never separated. He is a man of the desert,” she says, going on to tell me that “he was educated by a deer and by a horse”. Again, just as my brain is about to dismiss this, I think of the wisdoms that predate western culture’s commodifying and stripping of sincerity, and of commerce’s co-option and glib dilution of older truths. Of course we can, and should, learn from animals. Of course environment shapes us.
In 2006 the pair travelled to Ireland, exploring spiritual and archaeological sites, performing rituals, writing poetry, exploring myths and discovering shared connections. A sheela-na-gig resonated; in echoing sculptures from other cultures, it prompted a reading of the figure as mother earth, forebear of the world, rather than a grim warning against diabolical sin.
We have all been trained to think in certain ways, which is another reason why one may find oneself needing to shed a great many preconceptions when first encountering Vicuña’s work. Or, to put it another way, if you put in the work of asking your mind to see and feel differently when exploring this exhibition, it can yield great rewards. Not all cultures are, or should be, developing to embrace western European systems of thought and hierarchies of expression.
Shot in Bogotá, in Colombia, in March 1980, Vicuña’s film What Is Poetry to You? sees the artist exploring the city she had just spent five years in, videographer in tow, asking the question of poets and professors, prostitutes and policemen, dancers, mechanics and street hawkers. The answers are moving and profound. “Poetry to me has been a beautiful struggle to which I owe a lot,” says an elderly woman in the Policarpa barrio. “It is like a revolutionary dance, with time and with life,” says a poet.
“The lovely thing you have hidden inside, for me that’s poetry,” says a prostitute, who, like her colleagues, has asked for her face to be hidden. Many, remarks Vicuña, are married, and their families believe they are working in offices. “It can be lovely and sublime,” says another prostitute. “Because it is a sacrifice. Whether you like it or not. Everything can inspire.” Poetry “is the tenderness one has hidden in the deepest part of the soul.” “Sometimes,” a young policeman says, “when we are alone or have many problems, poetry can help.”
“The Chile I grew up in was a Chile of immense creativity, immense possibility,” Vicuña says. “It was a participatory democracy. There have been very few in the world. And this participatory democracy allowed for a teenager like me to be free. When that was removed from me, it was like the end of the world.”
It was also, she adds “a cataclysm for the culture of Chile. And Chile has never recovered from that. Part of that cataclysm is the destruction of the stories, the destruction of memory.” It was also the destruction of a political experiment that may have offered an alternative to our own rapacious systems.
Vicuña’s first solo show in Ireland, the exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art is based on a retrospective curated by Miguel A Lopez, expanded with Mary Cremin of Imma to create something new. It unfolds through a series of passages through Vicuña’s life and practice. There are the palabrarmas, and the paintings she made after meeting the surrealist Leonora Carrington, who taught her a method of layering that lends an eerie flatness to the work. There are re-creations of works lost after her exile from Chile, such as Brujo Pulpo, the dates of which – 1967/2023 – show the chasm of dislocated time. She had to give up painting for a while; “painting requires having a studio, having enough money to buy the oils, the brushes.”
A new sound work includes recordings of Irish curlew calls by Seán Ronayne. Echoes collect in a space shared with a sheela-na-gig borrowed from the National Museum of Ireland; works share affinities with those of Hilma af Klint and Louise Bourgeois. In the weaving of fabrics I see hints of Emily Waszak’s award-winning work at Temple Bar Gallery’s Faigh Amach earlier this year.
This is not because of any sameness but because all these artists are drawing from a shared well – and that is what we all do, every day. This exhibition is a reminder that its contents are precious, and that there is more way than one to taste its waters.
Reverse Migration: A Poetic Journey, by Cecilia Vicuña, is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in Dublin, until July 5th, 2026
