In Alta magazine, Tom Teicholz writes on Lita Albuquerque.
Her career has been one long intervention in nature with pigment. In 1980, she created one of her most celebrated works, Spine of the Earth, a 600-foot-wide spiral of red, yellow, and black pigment in the Mojave Desert. As for the way she applied the pigment, with a sifting strainer, that, too, was personal. It may have come, Albuquerque says now, “from making couscous.”
“It came so naturally to me,” she observes. “My daughter says, ‘Mom, you paint the earth.’ ” The past remains her inspiration. It is as if the memory of the rocky landscape of Tunisia and its blue sea is, despite the windblown sand, the home her father and mother could not provide.
As Albuquerque has revisited her earliest work and made new work, she has discovered that what ties it together is our “relationship to our bodies, to the earth, to the cosmos.” A recent exhibition in Brussels, Early Works, included a 150-meter-wide re-creation of Spine of the Earth.
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