Delcy Morelos has reached a career peak that is difficult to overstate. From her contribution to the group exhibition Arts of the Earth [2025–26] at the Guggenheim Bilbao to her commission at the Barbican, the Colombian artist continues to produce work of quiet, monumental force, drawing audiences into a direct encounter with soil, memory, and the politics of land. Given the United Kingdom’s unpredictable climate, how the earthen structure of origo [2026] will respond to rain and wind remains to be seen. Yet it may be that whatever happens becomes part of the evolving process Morelos embraces, one that mirrors the city and the society her work addresses. Erosion in London, shapes formed by processes beyond human control, beauty from the unexpected — this is an exhibition to visit and then return to.
Read Trebuchet interview with Delcy Morelos in T14: Ecology
Delcy Morelos: origo, Barbican Sculpture Court, 15 May – 31 July 2026
Exhibition notes: Delcy Morelos: origo
“In Andean ancestral traditions, the human being is living earth, I am a body, I am earth. In the exhibition space, the earth expresses itself; it is the center and mirror of what we are.” – Delcy Morelos
For the first time, UK audiences can experience a major public artwork by Colombian artist Delcy Morelos, presented by the Barbican from 15 May – 31 July 2026. The project responds to the Barbican’s iconic concrete architecture, carrying forward the Visual Arts’ commitment to commissioning beyond its gallery walls.
Delcy Morelos’s practice is rooted in ancestral Andean cosmovisions and the aesthetics of Minimalism and Abstraction. Her works inspire rumination on the interplay between human beings and the materiality of earth. Born in 1967 in Tierralta, in the Córdoba region – an area that was brutally affected by armed conflict stemming from illegal land appropriation and large-scale mining projects throughout the 1990s and early 2000s – Morelos began making paintings from red clay pigments that explored the entanglements between the body, territory and violence. Morelos has consistently represented beliefs in the earth as a symbiotic partner endowed with its own agency, rather than a resource to be possessed and controlled. Developing her material investigations into soil and plant matter through a framework informed by Andean and Amazonian relations to land, Morelos began creating colossal, monochromatic earthworks in which she intends her audience to be immersed.
These sculptural installations function as multisensory environments. Handbuilt from clay, soil, hay and plant seed, Morelos sows the earthen bodies of her works with fragrant spices, including cinnamon and cloves, which also contain antifungal properties vital for maintaining the health of the soil. Combined with the loamy scent of the soil itself, the heady fragrance of these spices engenders a sensory encounter that triggers emotions and memories, encouraging a more ethical relationship with what Morelos calls the ‘mother of all materials’.
origo responds to the Barbican’s architecture through its minimalist geometry and its organic materiality. Hand hewn and intensely tactile, the concrete surfaces of the Barbican represent a layered socio-architectural narrative arising from the devastation wrought by the Blitz and driven forward by post-war social idealism, modernist architectural principles, and humanist approaches to urban living. Influenced by Le Corbusier, the Barbican was designed in 1959 by architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon as a utopian ‘city within a city’ with high-density housing, elevated walkways, cultural infrastructure and integrated green spaces. As a central public space within this communal living project, the Sculpture Court was conceived to integrate art into everyday life.
The opening of origo is the first time in a decade that the Court has been used for its original purpose. Measuring 24 metres by 18 metres in diameter, and reaching over three metres in height, this is Morelos’ most ambitious outdoor work to date. Like the Barbican, there is the trace of touch and labour visible on its surface. Taking on a rounded shape, in a departure from the precise, angular forms Morelos has developed over the last decade, origo is configured as an ovular pavilion with multiple entry points. The porous topography of the work responds to the Barbican’s unrelenting concrete, positioning the precarious and malleable in dialogue with the rigid and imposing, highlighting the permeability of our bodies and their entanglement with the very material of the earth. Soil lined tunnels, each with its own symmetry and depth, disappear into the body of the structure in a motion of inward circulation, inviting us to begin thinking of community and communal living as something that occurs beyond our species – between humankind and the life contained in the micro matter of the earth itself.
The sculpture invites the public to surround themselves with this mass of earth; to roam its tunnels, experience its shifting light and fragrant smells, rest in its central enclosure and become part of its ecosystem. Through this encounter between soil and cement, ancestral South American knowledge meets the utopian, humanist ideals that underpin the Barbican, opening a space to reconsider how we live in the world.
A series of public conversations, including an artist talk with Delcy Morelos on 15 May will expand on the themes of Morelos’s installation. A short film that documents the installation’s construction process and includes an interview with the artist will be presented in the Barbican Art Gallery’s Level 3 foyer as well as the Barbican’s website.
Delcy Morelos: origo
Barbican Sculpture Court
15 May – 31 July 2026
Images: Installation view, Delcy Morelos: origo at the Barbican, London, 15 May – 31 July 2026. Photo: Barbican Art Gallery / Thomas Adank. © Delcy Morelos
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
