Tapestries that transcend.

• Author: Hood, Lucy

At first glance, Montserrat Castedo's tapestries are simple renditions of landscapes, images of the countryside surrounding her home in northern Chile. Typically, they depict valleys, a moon, or a lunar-like figure, tucked between rolling hills.

These moons have a way of looking at the observer in much the same way that eyes in some paintings and photographs seem to follow one's movement around a room. Castedo doesn't call them moons. For her, some of them are planets, "a reminder that we live in a sphere that floats in space." Others are simply circles, but not so simply, they are also the entranceway to another world, perhaps space, says the artist.

Some of these looming spheres, planets, or entranceways also take the form of an eye, thus heightening the sensation of being watched. At the same time, like all eyes, they seems to be a two-way mirror, there to observe and to reveal what is behind them.

A conduit between here and there, Castedo's tapestries are an invitation to explore the beyond, a personal meditation. As she says, "they are vehicles for something that exists somewhere else."

Known in the art world as "Rupali," which means "the beautiful" in Sanskrit, Castedo is inspired by the beauty she seeks in nature, particularly the countryside surrounding her home in El Molle, a five-hour drive north of Santiago in the Elqui River valley. The river, valley, and mountains that rush to the Pacific shore, all have meaning for her--"the Elqui valley is a very special valley. A micro-climate, never too hot and never too cold." But most importantly to Castedo, much of the region has not been explored; it is a "virgin" to human presence, thus its true nature and balance are preserved.

"For me, nature is harmony, and harmony is the most important thing in my life," she says simply.

Castedo was born in Santiago in 1941 to Spanish Civil War refugee parents, whose arrival in Chile was arranged by Pablo Neruda, who as special consul in Paris supervised the emigration to Chile of thousands of Spanish emigres after Franco's victory. Her father is the art critic and historian Leopoldo Castedo and her sisters, the novelist Elena, who lives in the U.S. and Beatriz, also a successful visual artist, who resides in Mexico. Raised in Chile, Montserrat Castedo came to the United States in the late fifties to attend Dominican College in San Rafael, California, where she received a bachelor's degree in fine arts. She married, had two sons, and continued to...