Working between drawing, painting, and printmaking, Yanomami artist Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe carries forms of knowledge, spirituality, labour, and aesthetics in Indigenous life that have survived colonisation onto the page. Born in Sheroana, a small Indigenous community on the Upper Orinoco River in the Venezuelan Amazon, Hakihiiwe began making paper from natural fibres in the 1990s, a skill he learned by studying with the Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata. Atop sheets fabricated from local plant life, Hakihiiwe renders delicate dotted lines, circles, grids, curves, webs, and squiggles that reference forms of ancestral knowledge in highly personal ways. Hakihiiwe has often said in interviews that he alludes to ancient patterns, shapes, and forms in an effort to preserve memory. In Hakihiiwe’s recent series of delicate monoprints, he composes abstractions of the environment through the rhythmic repetition of transcribed symbols used in Yanomami culture as well as new symbols created by his observations of the surrounding jungle or his community. Referencing insects, animals, and plants, the lines and dotted triangles in pieces like Iri mamiki (2021) suggest budding branches; in Yaro shinaki (2021), the lozenge-shaped leaves of a yaro tree; or in Omawe (2021), the delicate form of a dragonfly. Prints like Hahoshi (2021) have less concrete natural analogues, nonetheless the reference lilts of the waxing and waning of celestial bodies. Together, they form a growing and expanding graphic compendium of Yanomami symbols and signs.
Madeline Weisburg
