Text by Liz K. Sheehan / Curator

Natalia Mejía Murillo (she/her) imagines her practice as a cartography exercise, combining printed maps with glass, branches and other fragile organic materials in installations that both symbolize and perpetuate the ancient human drive to chart the unknown. Trained as a printmaker and influenced by the imagined worlds of writers Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, poetry and materiality hold equal importance for Mejía. Beyond traditional print techniques, she experiments with “the essential act of touch, the trace that a body leaves on another body,” endemic to both printmaking and sculpture.  Mejía’s practice rests on the creative freedom offered by the idea, drawn from Borges, that a practical map is inherently abstract and fictional. In her hands, systems of measurement and navigation, from the earliest human tools to the most sophisticated digital processes, become creative metaphors that can transport us to imagined realities. Like ancient maps that offered the promise of unknown lands, Mejía restores the sense of wonder and beauty to the object itself.  

Two experiences shaped Mejía’s interest in maps and measurement: the 2006 demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf, and her difficulty in shifting from the metric system to the imperial when she moved from Colombia to the United States. She realized that scientific systems are invented by humans and are therefore – like Pluto’s status – arbitrary, temporary and inherently unstable. She represents this in her work by using aged or fragile materials, like eggshell and glass, that are transformed or altered by the pressure of other objects. For the series of reclaimed wooden “Pillars,” blown glass orbs were pressed between segments of table legs when hot, and they conformed to the shape of the wooden posts as they cooled. Lines from a Borges’ poem are etched on the orbs. Like artifacts of an abandoned library, the use of rolled-up woodcuts and sagging stacks of paper underscore the search for knowledge just out of reach. 

Between Emergency and Imminence, 2023, features a grid of eggshell powder relief prints depicting a series of “redundant and ambiguous images about the moon.” They are a dialogue between data, information and poetry inspired by Italo Calvino. Cast from laser-etched woodblocks, the reliefs rest on a wall built from rough timber that suggests an architectural fragment. Mejía uses the appearance of age and ruin to imply an in-between state that offers opportunities for new discoveries.