Anna Maria Maiolino

‘The house was always full of mohair. Colour everywhere. Beautiful things, beautiful art, beautiful artists. There was no way I couldn't be part of it somehow.’

Anna Maria Maiolino

Anna Maria Maiolino is among Brazil’s most influential artists. Born in Italy in 1942 to an Italian father and an Ecuadorian mother, she emigrated first to Venezuela in 1954, and then, aged 18 in 1960, to Rio de Janeiro – a city which would have a transformative effect on her life and work.

Drawing, printmaking, poetry, film, performance, installation and sculpture have all featured in Anna’s more than sixty-year practice. Themes emerge from her experience as an immigrant and a woman,  her approach also having been profoundly shaped by years of military dictatorship governing Brazil. Recognition was slow to arrive: early critics dismissed her work as ‘obvious’. This so-called obviousness was however the precise element Anna employed in finding her language of resistance.

Once settled in Rio, Anna became immersed in the city's art world, studying at the School of Fine Arts and forming close ties with artists including Antônio Dias and Rubens Gerchman, whom she went on to marry. Through this circle she also came to know Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, whose radical ideas around the period would leave a lasting mark on her artistic philosophy.

In 1968, Anna moved to New York with Gerchman and their children, remaining until 1971 when the couple divorced and she returned to Rio with her two children, Verónica and Micael. The decade that followed was one of intense experimentation, as Anna extended her practice into Super 8 film, photography and installation, including her performance Entrevidas, in which eggs become a fragile symbol of precarious existence under dictatorship.

Verónica, Anna's youngest child and only daughter, was born in 1966, when Anna was 24 years old. She is an actress, writer, director, producer and researcher in puppet and mask theatre, having begun working in the field at the age of 13.

Since the early ’80s, Anna has worked increasingly with malleable materials – clay, dough, plaster – emphasising unconscious gesture, daily ritual and the sensory rhythms of being.

Read the full conversation between mother and daughter, in which they reflect together on family, memory and creative practice.

Tina: My first memories of weaving was during the tapestry you made with Judith Mason. That enormous tapestry for the Royal Hotel.

I must have been seven. I think I drove you mad until you made me sit next to you on the loom. Eventually, out of sheer desperation, you gave me some mohair and showed me how to weave.

Mags: That tapestry was woven in 1978. It was 33-metres, the biggest tapestry we have ever made.

The man who ordered it – Russel Stephens – gave us some money to build a real studio. Before that, I was working in a garage. It was made for this very long passage next to the open-plan dining room, so anyone sitting down to eat would see all of it. It had thick plaited and twisted warp thread hanging over the front so it was very three-dimensional.

I think it was quite chaotic for you as a child watching this thing being put together all over the floor and endlessly on the looms. You never saw it as a whole until it was exhibited at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. After the exhibition in Johannesburg it went to the Pretoria Art Gallery, and only then did it go to the Royal Hotel.

Tina: It is an amazing tapestry.

Mags: It was terrific. It certainly made a lot of noise for us in the art world. It was a tremendous effort — it took a year and a bit to weave that tapestry.

Tina: Who did you have working for you then?

Mags: I had myself and Zanele. Then Margaret came, Zanele’s sister, and she was terrific, but she wasn't permanent because she was having a baby. So, it was really just the two of us – myself and Zanele – who wove that tapestry.

Tina: I remember there were always people hanging around: artists that came in and out. Do you remember that David Goldblatt photographed the whole tapestry process?

Mags: Yes, he was wonderful.

When we did the installation in the hotel, he came as well. He did everything. He helped us put up the tapestry after first coming to the studio to photograph Judy and me on the floor. He was even more fun because when we arrived in Durban, he didn't take the bus from the airport to the hotel. He had brought his bicycle, and he rode everywhere.

Tina: Wasn't it around then that you also started working with Karel Nel? He used to come in when he was young.

Mags: He was a schoolboy, and he used to sit while I was working on the loom, and I'd say to him, “What do you want to do?” He said, “I don't know whether I want to be an artist or a museum director.” In the end, he became both.

The next biggest tapestry was also in Durban, at the ICC International Conference Centre, and it was 15 meters by 7, it was also enormous. 

Tina: I don't remember that at all.

Mags: Andrew Verster designed that one. We did a lot of work for him between 1978 and 1980.

Then you got older, and you did a lot of work with us, too.

Tina: I did a lot of bobbins at first. The house was always full of mohair. And then, we'd go on holiday to Swaziland to go and see my grandmother, Coral, and the whole place there was also full of mohair.

Mags: You couldn't sleep late in that house because the weaving shed was built around the courtyard. Coral had 16 flying shuttle looms and the studio got going early in the morning.

It was really loud with all those looms – click, click, click, click.

I thought everybody lived the way we lived. We had a lot of action.

Tina: I’ll never forget. With that history and being so immersed in it there was no way I couldn't be part of it somehow. It really was so exciting. Colour everywhere. Beautiful things, beautiful art, beautiful artists.

Even when I became a journalist, which I was for about 12 years, there was always some kind of weaving going on in my life.

And it’s interesting – it was always only women who worked in the studio, never men.

Mags: There was, and still is, a very strong patriarchal system here, and it was easier for women to work on their own without having men around. There would have been a social power imbalance. It made more sense to have just women together.

Tina: The studio really grew during Judy’s heyday with you, and it never stopped. Once William (Kentridge) started making tapestries in the 1990s, the studio really began to take on a global footprint.

A matter of Interpretation

Mags: A lot of artists saw William’s tapestries and realised the woven interpretation could do something unique to their work.

Tina: Initially, it was mostly South African artists. A lot of what happened – and what continues to happen – is thanks to William, because he has increasingly been shown more and more and in really important galleries and museums internationally. So more US and UK artists have seen his work and then also want their work translated. Quite often, clients or interior decorators directly approach the studio.

I feel like sometimes you find that people who have grown up in Europe or the UK, in cultures where textile art is very much in your face, understand tapestry. Maybe generally more so than in the US. Tavares Strachan made this point some time ago. He said quite a few people didn’t really get what he was doing until they saw the tapestries for themselves.

Mags: The tradition is there. Weaving is an important art form in Mexico and South America generally. Also, one of the first tapestry exhibitions we had with William was in America, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007.

Then there was the Fabric Workshop, which is quite famous in Philadelphia. They were very instrumental in pushing a lot of our work.

Tina: But, I think textile art has made an enormous comeback. There was the whole Anni and Josef Albers moment, and all that was happening in the ’60s with the Bauhaus movement.

Then, it went a little quiet and became less cool, I think. Now, you go to any exhibition, art show or art fair, and there's a lot of textile art. It’s become very much more sought after in the past decades

Mags: People are quite discerning about what they want. 

Tina: They really are. When it comes to the work itself, it is obviously a translation. If you have a Raphael, the tapestry is after Raphael. It's not Raphael's work.

Mags: It's the interpretation. I would probably do it differently from you.

Inheriting the Loom

Tina: How do you think I'm different?

Mags: You are much more detail-oriented, I'm much less detailed than you. It's very interesting, especially with the work you are doing now for Catherine Goodman. Also, the way you are understanding and interpreting the Raphael Vision of Ezekiel tapestry is much more in depth than the way I would have done it.

The possibility of working on a Raphael design would be frightening for me. I think you are very brave.

Tina: Do you?

Mags: Yes. I did work for Misha Kahn. The early work, Return of Saturn: Coming of Age in the 21st Century, was a fantastic tapestry. But then you took it a step further with him, with those massive carpets and his later tapestries.

Those tapestries were very complicated, and became three-dimensional. You really had the idea, and the bravery, to do it. I was quite impressed.

Tina: Isn't that amazing? I hope you told everybody how impressed you were.

Mags: I did. I don’t know whether they were listening. 

Tina: It's an enormous honour to have you, the greatest, say that you're impressed.

Mags: Well, certainly, I was given a head start because I was taught how to do a lot of weaving, even at university. So, the fact that I did it, gave me an advantage. And I had much more patience than you, especially when sitting at the loom.

Tina: I've got no patience at all.

Mags: I could sit a whole day at the loom and be extremely happy. 

Tina: I'm hoping that I've taken the studio a step further, in the production and the way things are happening, and also by bringing in new artists. But your history and understanding of craft are much deeper than mine, because you actually sat down and wove the first tapestries.

But it's interesting that you never used wool. This is the first time with the Raphael design that we are actually going to be using wool solely in a tapestry.

Mags: Wool was too expensive when Coral started weaving, and even when I started, wool was much more expensive than mohair. Coral and I also loved how silky mohair is and how it has a sheen that you can’t get with wool. It also spins so well. The strands tend to be longer than those in most types of wool. It also doesn't felt or mat as easily as wool does.

Mohair is way more expensive now. The Chinese market has created a lot of demand because people started learning more about mohair and realising how luxurious it is. It took quite a lot of careful farming and selective breeding, though, because initially the goats were a variety of greys and blacks. Now there are mostly only white goats, and obviously this makes it makes desirable because it can be dyed more easily.

Mohair wasn't available to the average person who was weaving tapestries in the 15th century. But if it had been available, it probably would have been used for tapestries.

Tina: I’ve learned so much in such a short period of time. But I think you have forgotten more about weaving than I will ever know.

A utopia at Home

Tina: In 2016, you asked me to join the studio on a full-time basis. I had children, and they were very small at the time. It made a lot of sense because I was already living on this property where we have the studio.

How do you find having me living here, running the studio in your face and doing all of this?

Mags: You really want to hear? 

Tina: Yes.

Mags: It's fantastic. I'm in my 90s, and if it weren't for this, I'd be sitting on my tod, not having any communication with anybody, probably in an old age home because I can't see as well as I used to. Instead, I've got this activity, this whole industry happening around me in my own house.

I love it. Absolutely; what a utopia. 

I love these tapestries. I love the whole feeling that the studio was built and is used properly, and that there's more to come, with other things happening down at the bottom of the property, including the new studios for the mohair and the exhibition space.

It doesn't stop. 

Tina: No. It hasn't stopped.

Mags: I really consider myself 100% lucky and don't even think about going somewhere else.

Tina: I wouldn't dream of it. 

I’m really lucky because I can ask you to come into the studio and have a look and give advice. What’s really amazing is you've never, ever told me I'm doing anything wrong, never criticised me.

Mags: No, sometimes I'll say, “I have to think about what you are doing.” Or I look at the design and say, “wow, that looks difficult.” And then I'll say, “I'm going to try and get my head around it.” 

Nothing can be more dreadful than having negativity. 

Tina: No, you've never been negative. You've been phenomenally generous. There is a very special generosity that is inherent in you.

But I remember when we had the big Misha Kahn carpet, and you were like, “No, this can't happen.” Then I was like, “It's going to happen.”

Mags: It was pretty amazing because that carpet was so enormous it had to be woven on two looms.

The two sides were woven simultaneously, like a jigsaw puzzle, so it didn’t have a ridge where the two sides met.

Tina: It really was like a jigsaw puzzle.

Mags: It was fantastic. You could never see that join. 

Tina: But do you know how amazing the weavers were in there?

Because I was like, “This has got to work. It's just got to work. What are we gonna do?” Eventually, everybody was so irritated with me; they said, “It’s going to work.”

Mags: It was fun, but the tapestry was going to be put on the floor with furniture on top.

Tina: I've always thought that we should have a tapestry and make it a bathmat.

Mags: I think you can get over yourself on that one …

Tina: No, okay we're not making a bathmat, Mum.

Art is everywhere

Tina: Even so, it would have been art. There is art everywhere; there always has been. There was art on the walls. There was art on the looms. There was art everywhere.

Mags: What we were doing was a craft, but the work was an artwork. You can't look at a tapestry and say it's craft; it's an artwork created by craft.

When you're doing painting, is it a craft or is it an art? When I take up a paintbrush, is that the craft of painting? Once it’s painted through it becomes the artwork.

Tina: There is a big crossover. If you're making a sculpture, the process of making it has got to be a craft – you can call it an art if you want to, but there is art in weaving. By the same token, if you're going to use the word ‘art’ as a skill, there is an art to handling my dogs.

When the tapestry is then woven, and you look at it, what has it gained in being made into a tapestry?

Mags: It gains another dimension. The line is never exactly the same. The colours don't necessarily have to be exactly the same, but the basic artwork is put into another context. I can't say that it's ever diminished.

Tina: What’s interesting is, if you look at the older tapestries, the borders are often really fundamental to the piece. But when you look at the cartoons they never had borders, so they were basically something created apart from the artist. They would be something the weavers and the patrons would design.

One of the things about tapestry is the blending of colours, when you mix two colours of paint, like red and blue, you will get purple. If you add a red thread with a blue thread, you're going to get red and blue threads. You can get the sense of purple by adding increased gradients of the two colours so the transition becomes seamless.

Mags: There are different ways of doing it because you can also dye the unspun mohair and then mix the colours during the carding process, like we do with shades of grey.

Tina: Yes, that’s right. You add more or less of each colour to get the right shade. 

Mags: I think the best example of how we’ve done our blending is in some of William Kentridge’s Porter Series tapestries. We started with the natural pale white, and then we'd mix two strands of white with one shade of 3, which was very pale grey. Then one white with one 3, then just 3 on its own. Then 3 would be mixed with 2 and 4, and it would go up to 5. The weavers were fantastically good.

Tina: That's what's happening with Helena Boas’ tapestry.

Mags: This method is a bit boring for everybody, but I'm telling you, you can do it.

Tina: You've often had artists come to you, and you’ve told them their work is too difficult. 

Mags: Sometimes it's quite hurtful to say you won’t do their work. So you say, “I actually haven't got time at the moment, but can I just take a photograph and leave it with me?” But, for instance, William wasn't unhappy at all on one or two occasions when I said, “Sorry, William, I can't weave this.” 

He was a bit taken aback, but he behaved extremely well. There have been people whose work I really couldn't bear to weave.

Tina: I remember you saying sometimes that certain work would not translate well into a tapestry.

Mags: It was a very good way of putting it to the side.

Tina: Of telling people that you didn't like their work.

You see that when it comes to me, I'll just say, “Yes, for sure. I'll do it. No problem.”
It just seems that I keep getting more and more difficult things.

Mags: You can't get more difficult and complicated than Catherine Goodman. Her work is going to be spectacular. 

Tina: It should be fine, because I'm not trying to make it three-dimensional. Also, with Catherine's work, there is a certain freedom to play with. I really think that her work is fantastic in a tapestry. Big and bold.

Mags: Tapestries are supposed to be big. The reason tapestries are huge is that they're not necessarily only decorative. They were used for other reasons as well. The bigger the better.

Tina: I just love the scale of them, the drama of huge tapestries.

Mags: But they also become untenable because people can’t accommodate the size. It's a luxury to be able to do it.

Tina: There is nothing quite as exciting as walking into a room or a gallery that's just huge and full of tapestries. They really are exciting.

But there are some absolutely beautiful small pieces I've seen in Europe, or even in places in England. Utterly beautiful, but small, without trying to be a wall hanging. They're a specific type of work that is an artwork in its own format.

Mags: That's fantastic. I've also seen some very interesting ones where people are doing experiments with different kinds of weaving that have a fragility that is really beautiful.

Tina: Whatever we make, we need to make sure that it's as good as it can be.

The End of the Matriarchal Line

Tina: At this point, my sons aren't going to be picking up any of this, and I can't see what’s going to happen in the future.

Mags: Maybe there's an artist who is interested in textiles and carrying on. You never know.

Tina: But, Mum, people have got their lives. No one has been immersed in it for their whole lives as we have. 

In the end, perhaps what happens is we shut the studio.

Mags: The tapestries have been made. They’re done. The only trouble is that it would leave a lot of people without work. There are all the spinners. There are the weavers in Swaziland, there are the washers, the dyers. There are an awful lot of people who rely on this. Maybe the government will take it over.

Tina: All those old weaving studios in Europe closed down, and people found other jobs. There comes a time. There's a cut-off point. Alternatively, the whole thing could be sold as an entity, but at this point, I don't see it going further than me.

Mags: I wouldn't like it to be sold to somebody using the same name. 

Tina: No, they wouldn't have any of the intellectual property because they wouldn't get the cartoons. But from the point of view of whether they wanted to use the studio to make carpets, then that would be a different concept. They would not have the same history with the artists.

Mags: Anyway, the point is, you will carry on doing this for the next 30 years. Won't you? Maybe 40.

Tina: 40 years? No, I don't want to do it till I'm 90. Good God.

Two families, three generations each, bound by the same craft.