Breathing Colors

Magdalena Maatkare

Textile Arts - textil and canvas

105 x 200 cm

During a residency in the Dominican Republic, I worked with fragments of textile to create a land art installation above a blowhole. A blowhole is a hole in the rocky coast: as sea caves grow landward and upward into vertical shafts and expose themselves towards the surface, hydraulic compression can have a result that compressed air is released through an opening at the top of the blowhole. In this residency I was working with the topic “breath” also inspired by the mind blowing novel by James Nestor: “Breath.” Breath is arguably the most fundamental function for our system as human organisms. This piece of land art depicts a natural organ of breathing - a blowhole breathing the textiles in and out. My question is: Which material do we breathe? And this is a choice everyone can make consciously. The textiles of the land art installation came back to Berlin and form the basis of this present artwork “Breathing Colors.”