CHUWAS & QUIPUS
(Pot-sculptures and Khipus)
Exhibition at the Chelsea Gallery
Chelsea Old Town Hall. London, UK
20-25 March 2006

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Born in the southern highlands of Peru, Susie Goulder has chosen as her professional name a word that encapsulates the sources of her inspiration: warmi means 'woman' in Quechua, an indigenous language of the Andes. Warmi, a woman of the Andes, makes chuwas, another Quechua word from the southern Andes meaning hand-made earthenware bowls. Chuwas hold the best things in life – the most delicious food, the most beautiful flowers – but Warmi's chuwas defy easy classification. Are these magnificent, sensuous works pots or sculptures, vases or women? They are, of course, both: they are vessels in the way that a woman's body is potentially a vessel, a container of new life. They are formed of clay, the material from which, in so many origin myths, the first humans were formed. And, as in the case of the first humans, they are shaped without help from technology, by careful, loving hands, using the traditional Andean technique of coiling.

Warmi's sensitive fingers create chuwas out of memories, and as containers of memory. Warmi's women are drawn from Andean history: Micaela Bastidas, the eighteenth-century revolutionary who was horribly murdered by the authorities for her role in the rebellion of 1780, led by her husband Tupac Amaru; and from literature: Doña Felipa, the charismatic ring-leader of the uprising of the chicheras* against corruption in José María Arguedas' novel Rios Profundos (1956). And they are drawn from mythology, above all from Pachamama, the supreme earth mother figure of the Andes: Pachamama, the land and the landscape, mother of the fruits of the earth, whose offspring include maize and potatoes, precious metals and clay. These children are created and nourished by Pachamama in the same way that a baby grows in the womb, is born and suckles from its mother. They owe their lives to her, and we in turn – our modern society and the world's multinational corporations – feed off her children.

Pachamama also personifies the Andean women of today, who continue to be exploited by forces beyond their control. Warmi's clay figures embody ideas of motherhood, fecundity and continuity; strength, security and stoicism. In the Andes the two outstanding art forms are pottery and textiles, both fundamental to human evolution: pots to cook and preserve food, to carry water, and to protect the bones of ones ancestors; textiles to clothe and protect the body, to carry a baby or bring in the harvest, and to dress the dead. Both have very ancient roots in the Andean region (pottery dates back about 3500 years, weaving is perhaps 1000 years older) and have always been used as important bearers of meaning.