Green-Dyed Vulture, an exhibition by the Brazilian artist Camila Sposati, will open at the Highland Institute for Contemporary Art on Sunday 14 October, 2-5pm.

The exhibition’s title is a quote from the Brazilian poet Mário Quintana, describing our human desire to repress or embellish an unwanted truth: a vulture dressed in the colour of hope, is still a vulture. Sposati shares the poet’s sentiment, seeing the best possible world as one that contains the possibility of another, immanent within it. This sense reflects the artist’s view of her own working methods and on the works in this exhibition: she explores processes of transformation, aiming to ‘allow something invisible to become evident’.

To pursue this, Sposati has researched transformative processes on microscopic and global scales, growing crystals in laboratories or studying geological effects in the Earth’s crust; research that has taken her to sites in Amazonia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Guatemala, Europe and Japan. She has been supported by organisations, including the Brazilian Ministry of Culture; Petrobrás; the British Council; University College London; The Arts Catalyst; the Royal Geological Survey; Tokyo Wonder Site; Montehermoso, Spain, and the International Residency programme at Recollets, France.

Her explorations focus on revealing relations between colour and shape in dynamic systems and investigating our experiential responses: the works’ multi-sensory aspects and our conceptual understandings. Here her work may be seen within the Neo-concrete traditions of Brazilian art. Sposati’s investigations develop the concerns of Hélio Oiticica (the artist most prominent in Neo-Concretism), with ‘activating the relationship between the subject and the work in real time’, engaging their surroundings and audience, and seeking a ‘primal experience of the real’, through shape and colour.

These concerns have widened her view to include cultural and anthropological understandings of the forms she explores. Visits to sites of man-made sinkholes such as Darvaza, in Turkeministan, or Guatemala City have led her to consider the essential discourse she observes between geological processes, the civilizations that inhabit these regions and the artefacts they produce.

One of three new works in this exhibition, Unlock (2012) is a direct response to her research in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, travelling along the ancient Silk Road. The piece, a print, hung on a wall and tied to the ground by two stones, shows a cartographic image of the earth. Reflecting the fabrics and tapestries of the nomadic cultures she encountered, it describes the fragility of a body in constant movement and in unpredictable patterns; our experience of gravity and magnetism.

Relating also to the exhibition’s title, its circular movement mirrors the flight of vultures, balancing between air currents and gravity, finding the point of greatest economy of energy. It is this point that holds most fascination for Sposati, and is echoed throughout her work; through circular forms and patterns or through a focus on the conservation of energy through transformative processes.

Green-Dyed Vulture has been supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and The Henry Moore Foundation.

The exhibition runs from 14 October – 18 November and is open on Sundays 2 – 5pm, or by appointment.

Source: HICA