Delcy Morelos has filled the second floor of MOCA Toronto with Ombligo, a new commission that hangs from the ceiling and swells toward the floor in the shape of a womb. Woven from sisal rope treated with soil and corn roots gathered in Toronto, the work is on view until February 14, 2027.
The piece stretches between the concrete columns of the gallery and is lit by natural light. The museum counts it among the most ephemeral large-scale works Delcy Morelos has made so far. Seen from below, its dark mass reads less as an object than as a lowered ceiling of earth.
Long strands of rope are spun and knotted into a dense web. Morelos took the spider as her reference: a structure that binds, catches, shelters and nurses. Up close the surface is coarse and uneven, and light passes through gaps in the weave.
Earth, corn and tobacco
Ombligo means navel in Spanish, a reference to origin and to the first lifeline between bodies. The earth in the work is mixed with corn, tapioca and tobacco, plants Morelos includes for the roles they played in nourishment and medicine across the Americas before European contact and the borders that followed.
Hanging low over the room, the work leaves space to think about sustenance, ritual, migration, extraction and restoration, and about the strained relationship between people and the land they depend on.
Paintings made of soil
Born in 1967 in Tierralta, Córdoba, and based in Bogotá, Delcy Morelos trained as a painter. Her early work treated paper with natural pigments. Over time it grew into multisensory, space-filling paintings made of soil and other organic materials. Her geometries draw on the cosmologies of Andean and Amazonian cultures she has studied, while her way of working with mud carries knowledge passed down by her grandmother, a descendant of the Emberá people.
Her forms guide visitors through space and nod to hard-edge painting, minimalist sculpture and land art. Scent plays a part too: Morelos adds custom fragrances to her work, so that memory is reached through smell and touch. Recent solo exhibitions include Madre at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2025), and origo at the Barbican Centre, London (2026). In 2022 she took part in The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale.
Ombligo was made with Tamat, the Mexico-based architecture studio where the sisal rope was produced. The soil was sourced locally, and the corn roots were grown and harvested in Toronto by Crooked Farmz and in Stouffville, Ontario, by Ratcliff Farms.
Artist: Delcy Morelos
Photography: LF Documentation / @lfdocumentation; Pepe Morón (portrait)
Location: MOCA Toronto, Canada
