For more than a decade, Delcy Morelos has been working primarily with earth, creating encompassing environments of geometrically abstract forms and dispersions. Drawing on the cosmologies of ancestral cultures, Andean and Amazonian as well as her own, Morelos’s work explores the sustaining power of mud in its many forms—as a source of life and sustenance. For Dia Chelsea, the artist has created two immersive, multisensory installations—Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven, 2023) and El abrazo (The Embrace, 2023), the latter giving the exhibition its title—where surface and volume converge and collapse through monochromatic expanse and material accumulation. Reorienting considerations of land and site toward embodied forms of material and ecological knowledge, Morelos aims to cultivate moments of connection with what she describes as the “intimate humidity of the earth.”

In conjunction with the commission, Dia presents Soil Sessions, an iterative series of interdisciplinary activations, poetic responses to, discursive reflections on, and embodied engagements with earth as subject and material in Morelos’s work. These public programs, presented monthly throughout the run of the exhibition, invite sustained engagement with the commission through a variety of lenses.

Delcy Morelos: El abrazo is accompanied by the first bilingual publication expressly dedicated to the artist’s soil-based works, edited by Kamilah N. Foreman, Alexis Lowry, and Zuna Maza. Published in English and Spanish with a folio of versions of Amazon Indigenous origin stories from Bará, M+n+ca, Uitoto N+pode, and Yucuna Kamejeyá and Yucuna Jeruriba knowledge-holders, the richly illustrated monograph will explore Morelos’s multisensory and deeply personal approach to working with land. Publishing date to be announced.

Delcy Morelos: El abrazo is curated by Alexis Lowry, curator, with Zuna Maza, curatorial assistant.

Images: © Delcy Morelos. Photo: Don Stahl