Migratory Movements / Elizabeth Xi Bauer Gallery

I am always seeking to extend the language of sculpture using sound and smell as well as vision to create volumes in space. This selection of movements is a kind of monument to celebrate migration in nature—whether plants, animals or humans—and the cross-pollination that all life depends upon. While I work with these forces, I am trying to create the opposite of stagnation.
—OM

Migratory Movements is conceived as a series of “notes” for a sculptural composition. It brings together visual observations on the communication and interdependence between insects and flowers, alongside olfactory reflections on consciousness, all presented in dialogue with Maciá’s 2001 sound work Tomorrow will be Cloudy. The sound is embedded within benches designed in collaboration with Jasper Morrison. It takes as its starting point John Wilkins’ 1668 attempt to systematically catalogue the animals said to have boarded Noah’s Ark. On the walls Maciá’s new pastels, frescoes and ink works on paper respond to and interact with both sound and smell (in the form of the olfactory sculpture The Smell of Consciousness), seeking to register the continuous movement of often unseen forces in the natural world.

A sculptor’s anatomical accuracy underpins Maciá’s every drawing, most visible in the intricate diptych observations(2025) of various insects and birds.  Their colour-by-numbers panels refer us to colour notation systems used by eighteenth-century explorer naturalists like Thaddäus Haenke (1761-1816). This reference to the techniques of the avid collectors and cataloguers of past centuries reminds us of the death inherent in our desire to categorise and systematise the natural world (and other colonial projects). At the same time, we are unsettled by their beauty, unaccustomed to aestheticizing insects, more used to seeing them as a disgusting pest and failing to understand their beneficial role in ecosystems. 

This thought-provoking dialogue continues in the large-scale pastels of butterflies, birds and flowers such as the Dead Horse Lily, a plant that mimics the scent of decay to attract pollinating flies deep within its flower, exemplifying nature’s ingenuity and the hidden communication (and sacrifice) between species. A series of frescoes created with natural pigments in the buon fresco tradition extends the conversation, referencing species whose histories are entwined with colonialism, extinction, and transformation such as the American cockroach, introduced to the Americas from Africa in the 17th century. The red oxide pigment deployed in a pair of gigantic canvases hanging back-to-back in the body of the gallery speaks to and celebrates the millennia-long interdependency between Magnolia virginiana and its pollinating beetle, Strangalia famelica, a relationship pre-dating the existence bees.

Exploring themes of movement and belonging, with Migratory Movements Maciá examines how we navigate physical, cultural, and ecological borders in search of identity and place. At the heart of his practice lies a reverence for motion—the journeys of butterflies, the flight and song of birds, the drift of desert sands, and the circulation of seeds and species—and respect for and celebration of the interdependencies of species. His works function as monuments to these migrations and relationships, tracing the paths of life across continents and through time.