Paper like Ink
Rob Smolders
Nederland, September 2017
Among all the ingenious uses of paper, Miriam Londoño’s work stands out as poetic and seemingly immaterial. Calling a work of art poetic is often a truism or an easy way not to have to put something into words, but here it is appropriate. These modest, open networks of colorful lines that sometimes depict a figurative representation and at other times a structure that cannot be directly traced, are like visual poetry on the wall. They appear to be written in a calm, well-cared-for handwriting, resulting in a flat line that can change color in places precisely defined by the artist. It is interesting that it is about paper, but it is not in the foreground.
“I’m not drawing on paper but with paper itself,” Londoño says on her site. She has built up a comprehensive body of work that may be well known in the Netherlands because she, as a born Colombian, has lived here for a long time and has exhibited many times. Her contribution to the CODA Paper Art Exhibition (Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, 2017) gives only a limited impression of it, and yet it stands out.
Fugitivos, (Refugees) from 2015, is a poignant image of a procession of walking people, packed with primitive bags and baskets, driven from the place where they were at home and on their way to an unknown destination. There is a nice contrast between the recognisability of such parades and the fact that these people have no face. There is something sloppy in the way of drawing and transferring to paper (I assume that she keeps those two phases in the process separate) and at the same time you have to think of baroque representations of large groups. In a similar way, you jump in your head from a current news photo, from any continent, to an imagination of the Passion (Londoño also made a series in 2016 called Via Dolorosa), the Flight from Egypt or the Entry into Jerusalem.
Each gathering of a group of people has the character of a celebration, a ritual. Art history offers a continuous series of impressive examples of it, from weddings, meals, funerals, war and liberation. It is unfortunate that the representation of companies from contemporary painting has disappeared – for a banal reason: no one can do it yet -, but that does not mean that such groups have been lost out of sight. The procession, expulsion and deportation of prisoners and refugees are very much alive as a motif in art. Johannes Grützkes Procession of Representatives from 1991 in Frankfurt, Thomas Schüttes Die Ankunft der Fremden from 1992, the film More Sweetly Play the Dance by William Kentridge from 2016 are just a few examples with a monumental appearance and meaning. The anonymous mass in motion, on foot, is the historical piece of history par excellence.
Miriam Londoño joins that series. The explanation in the catalogue: (“… addresses the refugee crisis with images of flows of refugees …”) does not do it justice. She does not go into it, she does not write a book and does not unfold reasoning. She makes an image of it and lifts it from current events to the level of universal recognizability and emotion. She amazes you, but that is why we do not have to pretend that we have lost our language ability. This is language, written on the wall with colored ink and indelibly etched into our consciousness.
Calligraphy and Memory
J. M. Springer
México, Noviembre, 2017
Miriam Londoño’s calligraphies are memory networks that seem to sweat air. In them, names, voices and stories of victims are linked like a textile warp, joining lines and creating spaces between them. As visual scores, these calligraphies are drawn with a manual cadence, a rhythm, a color, and even the texture of the paper they are made of.
The meaning of her work arises from the ambiguity between what it means and what the written word represents. More than communicating a precise content, in the manner of an article in the newspaper, it seeks to generate an emotion and evoke memory and remembrance. It is not the detailed description of things; its logos and praxis revolve around the trace that images and words leave in our minds.
Some of her artworks are based on names, autograph signatures, of those men and women who have disappeared, victims of the violence that has blinded their lives or restrict their freedom.
Her calligraphies, as resources of memory, add fragments of the history of the country’s recent conflict. All of them find their raison d’être in the artist’s need to understand the drama of life, to approach the senseless pain, to preserve the passage of time and to capture the spaces of silence that frame existence.
Drawing Emptiness
J. M. Springer
México, Noviembre, 2017
The work of Miriam Londoño is the result of research probing into the nature of drawing, as well as into visual poetry. With her drawing, Miriam Londoño has managed to express her journey through life, creating a logbook that traces her feelings about the world.
The letters she writes or transcribes, her sketches of cities, the handwritten books she crafts, and her renditions of the human figure all have something in common: they are sources of memory, rounding off the fragments of a personal and intimate diary. The reason for their existence is the artist’s need to unravel the drama of life, make contact with senseless pain, and capture the gaps of silence that frame the course of our existence. Drawing emptiness is her goal.
When we stand before the curtains made of letters, words and sentences, which the artist pours onto the walls of an abandoned house, or a church, the following questions spring to mind: How is it possible that so much life has become trapped in these nets of words? What kind of material does the artist use to make words float by themselves in space? And how does she ever manage to draw in the air?
For the past ten years Londoño’s artistic work has focussed on a type of drawing derived from hand-made paper techniques. Using damp paper pulp she draws figures on a fine mesh, stretched taut on a frame. As the pulp dries the drawings can be peeled off from the mesh.
This technique has a rare sculptural and textile quality, which has inspired the artist to develop new ways of working. She began writing words on the mesh fascinated by the visual aspect of the graphic signs that the pulp’s liquid track produced. Further down the road, she decided to work with poetic texts and thus made the leap to using images taken from newspapers and books as a basis for her works, mainly guided by her use of drawing as a tool to establish her position in relation to the world.
Londoño is interested in what cannot be translated about language: its visual appearance. She concentrates on writing as drawn fragments, which, when added together, form a comprehensible whole. The lines of her writings and drawings capture what is indispensable to perceive about life, but for her, that suffices to capture what is essential. Hers is not a detailed description of things; the logos and praxis of her works revolve around the traces left in our minds by images and words.
Shifting continuously between languages and cultures, identified with Spanish, her native tongue, but impelled by the need to adapt to living as a foreigner in contrasting countries and idiosyncrasies, Miriam Londoño has developed the ability to interpret people’s histories, finding a way to bridge the gap between the other’s and her own self.
To my mind, the most innovative nucleus of Londoño’s artistic proposal is her work with language. Her deepest thoughts are entrenched in her personal, intimate correspondence. These handwritten letters express her desire to connect with the past, with her family and origins. When transcribing the letters from other women, i.e.: a revolutionary or the victim of abduction, she gets into the heart of their lives by highlighting the key lines that marked their fate.
The transitions Miriam Londoño makes from letter to word, and from word to phrase, remind us of how humans apprehended the world: first through images and then by learning speech. Thousands of years ago, images were the sole representation of experience. With time hieroglyphics emerged, forming chains of images. The written language modified the nature of hieroglyphic drawings, converting them into a sequence of interchangeable and separable pictographs, which, when drawn by hand, carry in them the mark of the person who created them. It is revealing that some of Miriam Londoño’s works are based on people’s names, which look like autographs. They are the signatures of those men and women who have disappeared, victims of a violence who have had their lives cut short.
Just like images evolved into words and words became symbols, Londoño’s work suggests the ambiguity between what a written word signifies and what it represents. The deliberate alteration of the calligraphy has a purely expressive purpose, portraying the aesthetic side of language, which is so evident in her work.
At first glance, the letters drawn seem to be a cascade of moving words, a constant flow of signs stripped of their precise meaning. Between layers and layers of words, one realises that this is a way of using calligraphic signs and arabesques, to decipher an untranslatable representation: the emptiness of words, when one faces an unknown language, in which the reader can only gather intuitively a mood or a state of mind.
Just like graffiti on the wall, the letters that Londoño transcribes and the personal testimonies gathered in her visual poems, are symbols, ambiguous and uncertain as far as reading them is concerned. Some writings stick out among the rest. Letters or words overlap the grammatical sense of a phrase. I see visual music in them, a printed cadence and a rhythm, the colours, and even the texture, of the paper they are made of.
The paradox is that the writings and drawings are made of paper, so that the drawing protrudes from the wall, allowing the public to glimpse lines and volumes. A drawing that is free of support is like a sculpture floating in space. The drawings made by Londoño are filigrees of criss-crossing lines: a spider’s web drawn between two shores made of air.
A transformation has been decisive in the understanding of the poetic value of this work. From a text floating in the air, the artist has moved to the text object: the artist book, a format which Londoño has devoted a very significant part of her work. The structure of her books can be described as a net of folios that trigger meanings in the mind: what makes a book? Is it the words or the pages, or both? Seen as a sieve of ideas, the books stop being page-by page compilations, to be transformed, in Miriam’s hands, into fragile nets catching language’s essentials metaphors.
The poetry of various authors, from Saint Theresa to Pablo Neruda, has been woven into these books, joining together lines and leaving gaps between them. Words here are like living fabric, and the lines running across them form a weft, similar to the notes in a music score. Miriam’s books are a visual mesh in which it is only possible to approach their contents through imagination.
The city for this artist is a kind of open book. The architectonic labyrinth has been an object of the artistic imagination ever since art saw the natural landscape change into the urban landscapes of the nineteenth century. Miriam Londoño interprets the city like a kind of writing made of structures and spaces in perspective. A tower, a door or a staircase opens the city’s horizon towards the private worlds that windows and curtains only allow us to glimpse.
City landscape drawings are like the streets of Babel, the place in which languages divide and the differences between human beings flare up. The lines that constitute the urban reticula are like the lines in the palm of the hand, marks of a destiny. The houses and towers, canals and narrow streets, reveal the fates of their inhabitants. Their sinuous and fragmented contours give way to the moving landscape. Cities are living organisms, bodies that lodge life in their veins, everything is in flux.
Miriam Londoño began to draw human bodies, inspired by images found in newspapers and books. Certain compositions allowed her to see a significant tension emanating from the non-verbal language of bodies overlapping, thus creating either dramatic or playful situations. At first the torsos she drew reminded one of classical sculptures: straight and frontal. Slowly she began to fragment the bodies into more organic pieces, following the body’s movements. Gradually groups began to emerge, looking like clouds of people emerging from the wall and approaching the viewer, in which bodies dissolve into other bodies, inspiring identity and sensual connotations.
With time, guided by a sense of chance, the artist has become more and more seduced by the combination and montage of her images, as if they were a comic strip. The ensembles of men and women, in casual clothing, walking down the street, chasing their shadows, constitute an example of that Diaspora of immigrants carrying only the clothes they have on their backs, guided by destiny. Theirs is a path made of shadows and voids in between border lines.
Three links exist between writing, life and art for Miriam Londoño: the first has to do with using drawn words as a way to reveal life’s stories inhabiting the intimate world; the second is related with the urban scenario that creates a context for the identification of those inhabiting the social milieu, and the third, the contrasting relationship between the baroque forms of visual poetry and the wealth of meanings of language, together they connect people’s lives and communities.
One can see how objects and bodies are interwoven by the lines conducting the infinite number of life histories that shape the heart of the matter constituting Miriam Londoño’s world.
Meditation on Supporting Emptiness
on the work of Miriam Londoño
Vicente Botella
The Hague, the Netherlands, 2008
For Londoño paper is not the traditional support for texts, drawings or something else. The paper, on the contrary, comes to the foreground as an independent presence in itself. Voluminous, whimsical and sensuous. Formulated in this way, it seems as if Londoño is doing the same as a ceramist who forms clay into something standing independently instead of being the support of something else. There is a important difference, however. The form her work takes explicitly refers to the flatness of paper. Moreover, her forms are built up of words written in the air and drawings made in the air, consisting of paper only. This gives the work a remarkable duplicity. The paper has become a independent medium in its own right and leaves its function of support behind to come to the fore of our attention. Subsequently however, it uses this independence to refer back to its function as support, by remaining, above all else, flat and transparent, and by referring to the things it loves to support for us: words and drawings.
Seen in this light, the paper works of Londoño are the embodied self consciousness. Our own consciousness has a supportive quality in itself, it is the most subtle of all supports. Only when you are conscious of something, or when something reaches your consciousness, it exists for you and becomes ‘real’.
Londoño’s method of working is related to meditation on a subject with a strong emotional character. As the attention becomes involved in meditation, it slowly slides from the emotional content to the form or the structure of the consciousness that supports this emotion in the first place. This supportive structure, in its turn, becomes then a semitransparent screen that, as a contemplative state, however tangible it may be, refers to a reality that cannot be expressed in words. The space between the words, between the letters, between the thoughts … as unsupported being.
Dealing intensely and intimately with the paper pulp matter is an essential part of this process. The artistry this works involves, together with the strong physical engagement and the many repeated actions it demands, give the birth of each work in itself a meditative and alchemist character. While working, the artist is being transported into another state of being, and a transformation takes place, a processing, of what was once the strongly emotional cause of the work. In each work Londoño shows herself over and over again that everything returns self consciously to the supporting ground it is in itself. The ultimate ground of unsupported being.
Stories of Immigrats
Exhibition at The Colombo Americano
Juan Alberto Gaviria
Medellin, Colombia, 2007
We assume that paper is something given and natural in our culture, but it has not always been so. Miriam Londoño began her workshop on handmade paper at Amigos de los Limitados Físicos this November with examples of how, before the existence of paper, papyrus, parchments taken from animal skins, or carved stones were used in the desire that characterizes us to record our passage through this life
Paper, a material very generous to manipulate, was once a secret of the Chinese dynasties; today, it is present in our daily lives in thousands of forms, and is used indiscriminately all over the planet. Part of the purpose of the workshop entitled: “Recycle, chop, think, produce”, is to raise awareness about this excessive use of paper, learning to recycle it and use it for artistic practices.
As proof of the virtuosity that can be reached with this technique for the expression of the artist’s discourse, Miriam Londoño offers us a sample of her vast knowledge about paper with her work “Stories of Immigrants”. She herself is an immigrant who has been living outside of Colombia for more than 20 years, has lived in countries such as Italy, Thailand, Poland, Argentina and is now a resident of the Netherlands.
“Stories of Immigrants” is a compilation of personal testimonies of Colombian immigrants in the Netherlands. They are the story of a drug-addicted prostitute, an asylum seeker who has been living illegally for years, a housewife who left the country behind her light-eyed Prince Charming…..etc. They are all the story of a great dream far from the country of origin and its hard confrontation with the reality of a different culture.
This writing with paper pulp of very delicate nature, allows an interaction of graphisms, like fragile signs written in the air, where an apparent chaos of letters and words, become a metaphor of what can mean for the immigrant the immersion in a culture and language totally different from the maternal one, and the subsequent loss of that which is most proper to him, his language, as axis of his personal identity.