Carolina Aguirre
Alvaro Barrington
Heidi Bucher
Elda Cerrato
Zuzanna Czebatul
Paul Guiragossian
Kelly Jin Mei
Isabella Benshimol Toro
Rachel Whiteread
&
Pre-Columbian arts
Paul Hughes Fine Arts, curated by Yisi Li
Is a home a fortress of stone or a garment for the soul? The etymological roots of architecture, as it shares a common lineage with the ‘text’ and the ‘textile’ in the ancient Greek tekton, remind us that to build is, at its essence, to weave. Staged within the intimate Old United Reformed Chapel, this exhibition reimagines the wall not as a static, defensive barrier, but as a pliable, breathing membrane. Whether constructed in the mind or in masonry, these structures serve as sensitive filters for light, air, unfolding a shared human experience. By spotlighting a selection of artists from vastly different eras and cultural backgrounds—spanning the ancient Andes to the contemporary global stage—the show reveals a persistent human impulse: to translate the weight of our existence into a pliable archive.
The journey begins in Pre-Columbian South America cultures with the Valdivia Cosmogram, a 4,000-year-old stone script that provides the geometric DNA for humanity’s architectural grids — the foundational notion of Semper’s Wand. This fixed logic finds its first yielding expression in the ancient textile arts that follow, such as the Huari Tunic, through which the imperial hierarchy of the Andean empires and reverence for the cosmic world are at once manifested in responsive, wearable planes.
Moving into the modern and post-war periods, the exhibition confronts an age defined not by progress but by collapse. Wars, displacements, and upheavals are the visible fractures of an Enlightenment order failing under its own weight. The artists gathered here emerge from within this rupture, their practices born of bearing witness. Paul Guiragossian (1926 - 1993, Lebanon/Armenia) animated the very notion of partition; his vertical, rhythmic impasto translates the displaced human body into an architectural rhythm: a Human Wall of collective memory that bridges the monumental and the textile. Elda Cerrato (1930 - 2023, Argentina), through her poetic, monochromatic brushstrokes, bore witness to the transformative upheavals of her homeland.
In the contemporary turn, the exhibition shifts from structure to subject, exploring the postmodern impulse to dismantle the establishment by returning to its most foundational unit: the human self. The home, as it is ultimately built upon what we want and who we can be, becomes a mirror of the self. Heidi Bucher (1926 - 1993, Switzerland) makes this literal; her “skinning” (Häutungen) peels away the patriarchal layers of the ancestral interior as a radical act of feminist liberation. Alvaro Barrington (b. 1983, in various cultural states) wraps industrial burlap around self-constructed frames, reimagining the canvas as masonry dressed in textile. Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963, UK) casts the hidden lining of the room into solid form, archiving the very air we inhabit, while Zuzanna Czebatul (b. 1986, Poland) locates the textile as the site where grandiose historical rhetoric meets the precarious and handmade.
This inward turn extends to the body itself. Kelly Jin Mei (b. 1991, Singapore) crochets vessels in the fragile image of the burnt vases, reimagining the structural wall as a site of feminine fragility and gendered tension. Isabella Benshimol Toro (b. 1994, Venezuela) seals the ephemeral Life Drawings of daily domesticity in resin, as an act of self-diagnosis, preserving the overlooked textures of lived experience beneath one’s “social skin”. Carolina Aguirre (b. 1990, Chile), who dances onto the canvas, allowing her body to be the brush and her movement to be the record. The resulting imprints are honest transcriptions of her inner life, a terrain where migration, memory, and environment are inextricably entangled. In this final layer, the home becomes biological skin: our most fundamental shelter is not stone or textile, but the shifting terrain of our own existence.