Rites, Seeds and Refuge

Lucía Pizzani’s practice, informed by her studies in conservation biology and involvement in Venezuela’s environmental movement, is concerned with the intertwining narratives of natural and human histories. In this immersive exhibition, Pizzani presents newly commissioned and site-specific works which hold, in their material makeup, interspecies stories of migration: of plants and their products, cultural practices, and the artist’s own migration from Venezuela to London.

Pizzani’s ceramic Flora Totems are sites of cultural convergence, made from English clay and imprinted with corn and eucalyptus, as Pizzani invokes the histories of flora both native and imported to South America. These anthropomorphic sculptures reflect Pizzani’s tendency to identify spirit-like imagery within natural forms, exploring concepts of interconnectivity across plant and animal worlds.

Outside in the courtyard, between walls of ivy and rosebushes, a clay mural installation provides a home for tropical plants, drawing on the artist’s memories growing up in the green valleys near Venezuela’s Caribbean coast. The sounds of these plants’ pollinators fill the exhibition space, with a soundscape produced by Ezequiel Pizzani incorporating the wind, the batting wings of hummingbirds and the buzzing of bees.

Pizzani also presents Amate paper collages, made from the woven fibres of tree bark. The oldest examples of this material are Maya and Aztec codices – manuscripts containing chronicles, rituals and astrological recordings – while most artefacts were destroyed and the production of Amate paper banned by Spanish conquistadors. Now a significant cultural export representing the continuation of Indigenous cultures in Mexico, the material stands for the loss, endurance and transmutation of native cultures and the plant species intrinsic to them, and integral in reciting and sustaining their histories. Through her attentiveness to material histories and creation of talismanic and spirit imagery, Pizzani promotes a notion of nature as a refuge as it bears witness to human stories.