exhibition
Dulce Chacón, Gravesend / At the Forest Edge
Solo Exhibition
Date
April 5 – May 11, 2025Opening Reception
April 5, 2025exhibition Images
Click to Enlarge.
Dulce Chacon, Efluvio, Mal Aire 1, SUMI-E ink on paper, 27.9 X 39.3 in., 2024
Dulce Chacon, Efluvio, Mal Aire 6, SUMI-E ink on paper, 27.9 X 39.3 in., 2024
Dulce Chacon, Esquizos (selection), 2021, ink on paper, 17.3" x 12"
Dulce Chacon, Desire, 2025, agave yarn dyed with muicle, 12.5" x 18.8"
Dulce Chacon, Paloma, 2025, SUMI-E ink on paper, 7" x 9.4"
Dulce Chacon, Mountain Conditions Are..., 2025, gouache on paper, rope, 86.6" x 28.3" x 39.3"
Dulce Chacon, Ninañi, 2022 watercolor on paper, 9.8 X 12.9 in
Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo
About the exhibition
DULCE CHACON
Gravesend / At the Forest Edge
April 5 - May 11, 2025
Solo exhibition of botanical drawings and installation by Mexican artist Dulce Chacón, curated by Fernanda Ramos Mena.
At the Forest Edge
To inhabit the world means allowing oneself to be traversed by others. Breaking the idea of the center from which we narrate ourselves as human beings is a counter-pedagogical action that sharpens the perception of the body and reveals the sensitive as a vital impulse. This expelled energy translates into gestures that are also agreements, where we understand the presence of the multiplicity of beings that inhabit even the free edge of our fingernails. The body-dwelling is only one of the ecosystems with which we interact, a space where countless microorganisms coexist with and beyond us.
Opening perception to those other forms of life that cover our skin allows us to overflow outward and think of ourselves within a network of interconnections. These relationships are not always harmonious; they do not have a beginning or a sharp end, but configure a regenerative cycle in which each breath leaves a cadence of our animality suspended in the air. That same animality is interrupted by death, initiating a process of putrefaction that, in turn, sustains the vitality of other beings.
The ecosystems from which we derive are both one and multiple, marked by hybridization, symbiosis, and migration in search of favorable environments. However, the categories imposed by the colonial West, still latent, perpetuate division, exclusion, and a sense of superiority over others. In this framework, the gestures of our animal becoming are annulled by ideological postures.
Driven by an immense curiosity, Mexican artist Dulce Chacón activates every corner of her body, guided by science-fiction literature, agronomy texts, and the experience of being-being with others. Her drawings move away from the scientific precision that scrutinizes without allowing itself to be questioned. For Chacón, the repetition of the stroke is a way of attending to the gestures exchanged with other beings who, inevitably, have traversed and transformed her way of being among worlds.
In this process, the artist has established a reciprocal relationship with visible entities, such as plants, and invisible ones, such as the knowledge they carry within them. Areas where native vegetation still sprouts in Mexico City, such as Tlatelolco, or the Primavera Forest in Guadalajara, have been starting points for walks of recognition and coexistence with the environment. Now, the At the Forest Edge project combines this long-term work, where the forest is revealed as a liminal space in which the animal, the vegetal, the spiritual, the underworld, and the cosmic interact, generating social, political, and cultural encounters.
To this end, she invokes the figure of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan missionary, chronicler, and ethnographer who, despite having served as an emissary of the Spanish colonial empire by documenting the knowledge of Mesoamerican cultures, reveals in his texts not only the curiosity of the traveler, but also the experience of a body that is impregnated with what it does not know, allowing itself to be hybridized and recognized in relation to what is experienced. In Mountain conditions are… (2025), the artist, in a meditative gesture, repetitively rewrites, with a grandiose calligraphy, Sahagún's words: "The mountains [...] are sad and lonely and tearful places, they are cavernous places, they are rocky and stony and muddy places and sweet earth and yellow earth." The reiteration of "places," in addition to referring to old Spanish, evidences a search to situate oneself in that on which one's feet rest.
At the Forest Edge is an attentive exercise that, through drawing, reflects on what it means to move to an unknown site and the transformation that this movement generates in our sensitive bodies. Dulce Chacón's forest immersion is, at the same time, a metaphor and a reality of the entities that move, migrate, and converge among crossings, inhabiting liminal spaces where they hybridize and are affected by others.
Plants, due to their capacity for propagation, arrive in new territories by accident or as a trait of identity transported by people forced to migrate. In Todo lo que se mueve, Mexican writer Valeria Mata points out that the seeds that fall under their mother tree tend to die in greater proportion than those displaced by the wind, the oceans, or animals. This resonates in the Efluvios series (2024), where Chacón draws diverse plants—pirul, tobacco, chicalote, elderberry, espinosilla, eggplant, brusca, cuatecomate, temoixitl, cempasúchil, axohuaque—composing a vegetal being that breaks and intermingles as a healing power. These sister herbs share a property: they all serve for the "evil of the air."
The rivers, herbs, and stones that run through wooded areas have a symbolic charge that gives meaning to rituals possible only within them. In her immersions in the Primavera Forest, Chacón found stones with moorings, evidence of the spiritual relationship between the human and the nonhuman, petitions directed to the forest entities. From this finding, she created desires around the stones (2024–2025), exploring their strokes and shapes with threads that evoke the memory submerged in their deep time of millions of years. Then she cuts this tangle of repeated gestures and embroiders it on fabric, generating vital lines that recall the chaotic paths of her hands on the stone or the irregular paths of the forest.
The network of interconnections of the forest, sustained by a framework of hyphae that communicates and links all beings, evidences a chain of affections and interdependent cycles. Among the ascomycete fungi, the cordyceps stand out, known for their parasitic relationship with insects and other arthropods. In her series dedicated to them, Chacón does not dwell on their form, but on their invisible and devastating gestures: how they consume the tissues of their host, control it, and disseminate their spores until depriving it of life. Thus, the artist parasitizes her other drawings, accounting for the chaotic and hostile networks woven into the vitality of the Earth.
In the effects on our bodies in the current panorama marked by uncertainty, to inhabit "is to orient oneself and perceive ourselves in relation to the world." In At the Forest Edge, Dulce Chacón deploys that orientation as a sensitive gesture, where drawing becomes a form of inscription of the environment. Her strokes, perhaps, manifest how to inhabit is to trace bonds, recognize our porosity, and allow ourselves to be affected by those who surround us.
Fernanda Ramos Mena is a writer and curator who lives and works in Mexico City. Currently she is Chief Curator at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil.
References:
Bardet, Marie. “Hacer mundos con gestos.” En: Haudricourt, André. El cultivo de los gestos. Entre plantas, animales y humanos. Buenos Aires: Editorial Cactus, 2019.
Giraldo, Omar Felipe; Toro, Ingrid. Afectividad ambiental: sensibilidad, empatía, estéticas del habitar. San Cristóbal de Las Casas: El Colegio de la Frontera Sur; Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 2020.
León, Emma. Vivir queriendo. Ensayos sobre las fuentes animadas de la afectividad. Madrid: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias, Sequitur, 2017.
Mata, Valeria. Todo lo que se mueve. Córdoba: Ediciones DocumentA/Escénicas, 2024.
This exhibition is made possible in part by the support of Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo.
