Textile Details

'Return to home and harmony', Anonymous student work, Queen's University, Belfast. (Photo: Fiona Clark)

This piece was created as part of an assessment for a final year undergraduate course on literature and the environment.

The student created a vivid image of a short story ‘Sobre la piedra’ (‘On the rock’) by Tatiana Lobo set in Costa Rica and detailing an elderly indigenous Bribri woman’s return to the site of her origins. She turns her back on the anonymity and desolation of modern city life, slowly incorporating herself once more into harmony of the natural world and place of birth and death.

The student reflected on her own experience of family outings beyond the city environment and the sense of comfort she still experiences when she returns to those sites. The choice of colours seeks to highlight how colourless life can become for anyone who does not have the opportunity to go beyond the urban environment. By contrast, the increasing colour on one side highlights the woman’s re-incorporation into an environment where she is at harmony with the natural space around her and the spirits of her ancestors. Details of jewellery and repetition of ‘four’ elements (hills, flowers, bushes) draw on symbolic numbers in the Bribri creation stories.

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