A formal and conceptual interest in textile is intrinsic to the work of Johanna Unzueta (b. 1974, Santiago), with fabric dyes and stitching techniques extending into her sculptural and paper-based artworks as well. An attentiveness towards the history and origins of her materials, as well as an interest in Chile’s textile industry and questions surrounding labour in the Southern hemisphere are amongst her central concerns. When working directly with textile mediums, as in ‘Pipes’ and ‘Axe,’ she confronts the fallacies surrounding fibre art, especially in a Latin American context, with its associations with women’s craft (and the adjacent connotations of softness, fragility, domesticity and nature), and with tradition as an incompatible antithesis to modernity.

Unzueta is reliant on local traditions and skills passed down through generations of women; she was taught traditional Chilean needlework skills by her mother and grandmother, before working as an apprentice to an indigenous Mapuche woman in rural Chile, from whom she learnt to weave and spin and to use vegetable dyes. These skills are evident in 'Axe,' while in 'Pipes' the felt is dyed a vibrant blue using Guatemalan indigo. Meanwhile, her frequent use of felt is an unexpected reference to male modernist influences, Joseph Beuys and Robert Morris.

Unzueta’s choice to reproduce industrial machinery, tools, pipes and taps in hand-dyed felt subverts assumptions around textile art. On close inspection, the fine quality of the merino felt, the deep richness of the natural dyes and the minute stitches along each seam become evident; the laborious acts and the time involved in creating such seemingly unceremonious objects is time spent considering the unseen labour in modern life. From further away, the sculptures are a series of clean lines – fluid drawings across the walls, a pastiche of minimalist abstraction and modern industrial architecture.