Marta Palau’s expansive body of work—like the sacred maguey plants that produce some of her most cherished fibers—is firmly rooted in Mexico. Her commitment to the material culture of her adoptive country informed her long-standing devotion to the relationship between what grows from the earth and spirituality. This particular, perhaps mythical, approach to regional materials also paradoxically spared her from comparisons to her generation’s so-called “fiber artists,” a term that has often been used by art historians since the 1960s to designate the work of mostly women artists who engage with textiles in various forms. 1 

Born in Spain in 1939, Palau emigrated to Tijuana with her family in 1940 after the dissolution of the Second Spanish Republic and General Francisco Franco’s rise to power. She studied painting and sculpture at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City before returning to Spain in the late 1960s, determined to learn about textiles from Josep Grau-Garriga. She had developed an interest in fiber and tapestry prior to her cross-continental move, experimenting with sarapes, rectangular wool blankets woven by hand or by machine in a variety of colors and motifs, and traditionally worn by men in Mexico. A design typology that comprises many different variations and materials and is not limited to a specific weaving technique, sarapes might have proven too ambiguous for Palau—their materiality too detached from their context and their construction too simple. 2 By contrast, Grau-Garriga’s practice strove to highlight the inherent meaning and expressive quality of materials, often mixing wool with humble fibers such as jute or hemp and interweaving plastic cords and pieces of used clothing to create distinctive textures. Grau-Garriga was inspired by traditional tapestries—especially the medieval ones seen in the churches of his native Catalonia—but he questioned the established approaches to weaving, seeking to expand on what he believed to be the overly rigid interplay of warp and weft in traditional loom weaving. He experimented with the three-dimensional possibilities of tapestry, creating textural wall hangings that are often characterized as sculptural. 

Palau took up this mantle, fully embracing textiles and fiber without the constraints of the loom. 3  Like Grau, she removed tapestry from the wall, experimented with materials, and heightened the sculptural and architectural capabilities of the medium. It is worth noting that this sculptural treatment was also employed by other women artists such as Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz, whose practices, unlike those of Grau and Palau, have frequently been analyzed through the marginalizing lens of “craft.” Upon her return to Mexico, Palau united these formal concerns with artisanal practices from Tijuana like palm weaving and basketry, incorporating humble local materials such as plant fibers. In contrast to Hicks, whose own interest in the textile traditions of Mexico stemmed from their technical sophistication and was particularly drawn to the backstrap loom, 4  Palau’s work has been called “anti-technological” by art critic Rita Eder. “Her impatience with technical rules gives her work an electric quality, a sensation of immediacy that excludes preconceived feelings,” she has written. 5 The artist intuitively knotted, tied, cut, embroidered, and stitched her materials, heightening the textural beauty and malleability of mundane and easily accessible fibers in a ritualistic process that established a spiritual relationship between the artist, her material, and by extension, the earth from which it was taken.

The connection between textiles, the earth, and the spiritual is, of course, another lesson that Palau learned in Mexico, a country with a highly developed thread culture. Textiles were considered by pre-Columbian Indigenous communities, and by many contemporary ones today, to represent a connection between Earth and the divine, and often believed to contain messages from deities. The Maya moon goddess Ixchel, for example, is the patron of human-made textiles and is also guardian of the earth and the crops. She is believed to have handed women the loom and to have taught them the sacred symbols based on geometric models and made up of rhombuses and squares that are still depicted in Maya textiles today. 6 Palau didn’t engage with any specific pre-Columbian or Indigenous myth but instead incorporated particular elements—the meanings behind certain materials or the use of abstracted geometric forms—into the creation of her own mythic thinking. Like the Indigenous creation myths that surround textiles in Mexico, Palau’s works are born from the alchemic encounters between materials, the earth they come from, and the hands that manipulate them.