Woven Circlescapes

Site-specific installation, 2025

60 constructed Circlescapes, thread, textile, embroidery hoops, natural fibers, gold thread

“Memory is circular. It spirals and returns—never quite the same, never lost.” —Angela Bolaños

Suspended like quiet constellations, these handwoven circles serve as portals, shields, and soft maps. Each is created through a meditative process rooted in Central American textile traditions and Indigenous cosmologies. The circle—an ancestral symbol of harmony, continuity, and sacred time—becomes both tactile memory and spiritual structure.

Woven into these forms is gold thread, glimmering not only as a visual element but as a charged symbol. In many Indigenous traditions of the Americas, gold held sacred significance, associated with the sun, divine cycles, and spiritual authority. Through the violence of colonization, however, it became a tool of extraction and conquest. By integrating gold into her woven forms, Bolaños reclaims its meaning, transforming a symbol of exploitation into one of healing, resilience, and ancestral continuity.

Bolaños understands memory as a living terrain shaped by diasporic longing, familial stories, and the repetitive gestures of making. Weaving is not only technique—it is ritual, feminist labor, and ancestral knowledge transmitted through the hands. From afar, the work reads as abstraction. Up close, its textures and threads invite intimacy and quiet reflection.

These woven forms create space for both rootedness and displacement to coexist. Like memory itself, they hover between clarity and blur, between the visible and the felt.

Sophie Bonet

Chief Curator

The Frank C. Otis Gallery and Exhibition Hall

Works currently on view at The Frank until September 27th, 2025.