'I was 24 when my world was destroyed': Cecilia Vicuña on Chile, art, and Aran sweaters
Cecilia Vicuña's first solo exhibition in Ireland is currently on at IMMA. Picture: Bruno Savelli
Cecilia Vicuña’s solo exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin is her first in Ireland. Reverse Migration, A Poetic Journey is inspired by a trip the New York-based Chilean artist made here with her partner, the poet James O’Hern, in 2006.
“James is Texan, Irish, Chickasaw,” says Vicuña . “He grew up in the Chihuahuan desert, surrounded by American Indians. But just before we met, he had published an extraordinary book of poetry called Honoring the Stones, where he traces his Irishness.
“James had requested his DNA from a scientific organization called Oxford Ancestors, part of Oxford University. And when we met and fell in love, he gave me a DNA test as a present. You have to take two tests, one for the maternal line — that was American Indian for me — and one for the paternal line, which was the same clan as his, the Oisin clan in the north of Ireland.”
O’Hern had already made many visits to Ireland, attending archaeology workshops in Dublin, and he designed a month-long journey, from Galway up through Mayo to Belfast and back down to the capital, visiting a series of sites that were at least 5,000 years old. “We performed little rituals of gratitude at each, just for existing, for being alive, you know.”
Vicuña’s upbringing was idyllic. Born in Santiago in 1948, she began painting and composing poetry at an early age, and went on to study art at the University of Chile. On graduating with an MFA in 1971, she won an British Council Award the following year that allowed her to move to London to continue her studies at the Slade School of Fine Art.
She was there when General Augusto Pinochet led the coup against the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in 1973. Allende died during the coup, in circumstances that remain disputed to this day, while Pinochet established a brutal dictatorship that endured for the following 17 years.
“I was 24 years old when my world was destroyed,” says Vicuña.
“I was active in the democratic process of Chile, so I couldn’t return. I remained in London for three years, and then I moved to Bogota. And after living in Bogota for five years, I was invited to the US and I arrived here in 1980. I met someone, I married, and that’s how I ended up staying until now.
But of course, I spend long seasons in South America every year, in Chile and in other countries too.”
Vicuña’s career as an artist and poet is celebrated in one part of the exhibition of the exhibition at IMMA; a small retrospective, organised by the curator Miguel López, that presents a series of artworks and documentation from the 1960s up to the present.
It largely focuses on her activism; Vicuña has always been an outspoken environmentalist, and she was a co-founder of Artists for Democracy, a movement established by artists and intellectuals to help restore democracy in Chile after Pinochet’s coup.
The second part includes some of Vicuña’s work from a recent exhibition at the Xavier Hufkens Gallery in Belgium, along with a series of brand new pieces she has made specifically for IMMA. “I created them in situ with a group of artist volunteers,” she says. “They worked with me over three weeks to create five new installations that never existed before. I’m very proud of that; it was such a joy to work with young artists from Ireland.” Each of the new works is a quipu, a Quechua word that translates to ‘knot’.
Among the Inca and other Andean cultures, “the quipu was a form of writing without words,” says Vicuña , “with knots condensing information by the twist, by the spin, and by their position. The quipu has as many iterations as the alphabet. It’s not simplistic information or data. On the contrary, it’s a complex form of mathematics and a complex transmitter of knowledge.”
Vicuña has used the quipu in her practice for years, adapting the form to all sorts of circumstances. One of the new quipu is based on the Aran sweaters she encountered on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands, on that trip in 2006.
“It’s a fishing community, and I learned the extraordinary concept behind those beautiful textiles, which is that each lineage has a design. And this design helps the families recognise and identify the people who may have drowned at sea.
"And so, in homage to that tradition, I created the Aran Quipu. It’s not imitating the designs of the Aran sweaters, it’s inspired by the existence of the concept of communication via the wool, as a transmitter of knowledge, which is what it has in common with the quipu.”
All these years later, Vicuña still treasures the sweater she acquired on Inishmore. “I wear it every day,” she beams.
Another of the new works is called Foraging Quipu, dedicated to the native plants of Ireland. "We sent out a request to the people of Dublin to bring in twigs, bones, and different kinds of industrial debris. And with that, I composed a sort of floating quipu, where you enter the universe of endemic plants mostly.”
Nearby is a sound installation.
“It includes the song of the curlew, which is in danger of going extinct. It’s an extraordinary song from the wetlands of Ireland. There are many curlews in the world; some even migrate to Chile to feed in the summer. But I have never heard a curlew that sings like the Irish curlew.”
The installation also includes some of Vicuña’s own songs, for the melting glaciers of Chile. “Chile is becoming one of the first countries that will be left without fresh water because of the mining operations and climate change. The glaciers are melting fast, and many of the great rivers are drying up. So I sing for those.”
At 77, Vicuña could consider resting on her laurels; alongside her career as a visual artist, she has published 35 books of poetry and commentary, including Mapping the Silence, produced with O’Hern for the IMMA exhibition.
But her calendar for 2026 is already filling fast: she has one exhibition lined up at Castello di Rivoli, near Torino in the north of Italy; another at the Kunsthaus in Zurich; and a third at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, this latter being part of the Schmidt Art and Ecology Award, which Vicuña won in 2024.
“For all these exhibitions,” she says, “I will be bringing together the practice of quipu and the struggle to safeguard the glaciers and the sea, which are my two main focuses.
"I will continue using a poetic language, because this is, I think, the legacy of the indigenous people; they expressed themselves in a supreme form of abstraction, which is absolutely concrete and grounded in the earth. And that is the spirit I follow.”
- Cecilia Vicuña’s Reverse Migration, A Poetic Journey runs at IMMA, Dublin until July 5, 2026. Further information: imma.ie
