About the piece
Where the line and the bloom meet.
At the centre, a circular medallion holds a heart of leaves — orange, gold and green — rising from a single stem and crowned by a magenta flower with curling red tendrils. Around it, the whole indigo field is worked in classic Shipibo kené: the dense, maze-like geometry the Shipibo-Konibo describe as the visible song of the forest. A zig-zag embroidered border in pink, green and violet frames the cloth.
Simi works in both embroidery and painting, and creates her own kené. Here she does something the tradition rarely allows — she sets a figurative bloom inside its strict geometric line-discipline. Classic kené is almost always purely geometric; the pairing of flower and line is hers. For Simi, kené is “ancestral wisdom — a wonderful world.”