Cascading Threads of Wonder

Cascading Threads of Wonder magnificently woven by Ana Teresa Barboza take embroidery out of domesticity and into the realm of Art, while they also posit innovative concepts about sculpture.

“I don’t think I make much of a distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fantastic’. They both seem to be threads in the same cloth...” stated Alice Hoffman, an American novelist and young-adult and children’s writer, about her work. She is best known for her 1996 novel “Practical Magic”, which was adapted for a film with the same name in 1998. Now, this could perfectly apply to Ana Teresa Barboza’s beguiling textile artwork.

Born in Lima, Peru, where she keeps on living and working, Ana Teresa Barboza studied painting in the Faculty of Art at Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, and started her career working different concepts using clothes and embroidery as her medium. After several phases in which she experimented needlework, representations of animals and men mixed with embroidery, and photographs onto which she added stitches to create a three-dimensional look and feel, her fascinating “Suspension” series has won her a prominent position within the art world.

Her ground-breaking works literally burst “out of the box” in a glorious celebration of the natural world. Ana Teresa Barboza is the magic weaver who leads her threads into freedom with cascading landscapes flowing out of the frame, thereby assigning them with volume, shape and a life of their own which releases them from the confines of embroidery and the limits of hoops. In fact, Barboza’s textile works break the traditional two dimensional barriers and rightfully achieve the status of sculptures in all the glory of their exuberant colours and textures.

Each of Ana Teresa Barboza’s works in the “Suspension” series offers viewers delicate illusions, mirages of landscapes, which then seem to dissolve themselves in their own nature, thereby achieving their destiny. The dramatic and unexpected extension and highly tactile threads of her works spilling out of the frames and flowing down the gallery walls invite our fascinated touch.

Barboza has reinvented the craft of embroidery and brought it to the realm of Art by means of an innovative and extremely creative technique in which she combines needlework, knitting and crochet to produce those wonderful textures which are her very own touchstone. On the other hand, Ana Teresa Barboza’s artwork features a highly thought-provoking organic characteristic which evokes our ties to the world around us and to each other.

Her deconstructed landscapes celebrating the materiality of her craft allow her threads to follow their wild nature, either under the shape of turbulent seas or calm seascapes, peaceful fields or chaotic landscapes to powerfully perform a unique role as visual narrators of the indissoluble link between humans and Nature.

In fact, Ana Teresa Barboza’s whimsical artworks disrupt the barriers of tradition and frames to reach out to viewers and challenge them, as if inviting them to interaction, once the usual limits between art object and spectator have been deliberately broken, much in the same sense as the “distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fantastic’ (...) seem to be threads of the same cloth”.