For three decades, Delcy Morelos has developed a practice across painting, installation, and sculpture in which soil, clay, fabrics, fibers, and other natural elements are the primary materials. Over time, her paintings turned from reds to earth tones, and then into large scale immersive installations made of soil. In Earthly Paradise (2022), the soil rises above the ground, and masses of earth surround the spectator’s body. Visitors can smell the earth’s aroma mixed with hay, cassava flour, cacao powder, and spices like cloves and cinnamon while sensing the soil’s moisture, temperature, texture, and darkness. While this installation evokes the Minimalist aesthetics of works such as Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977), Morelos’ use of earth is informed by Andean and Amazonian Amerindian cosmologies and conveys the notion that nature is not something inert that we access and control at our will from an outside and exceptional position, but that we are earthly beings – we become, live, die, and decompose with and as the earth. As the soil penetrates and affects our body and senses, our human becoming takes a new shape: we apprehend we are always becoming humus, as the Latin etymology of the very word “human” recalls.
Manuela Hansen
