Delcy Morelos is telling me about her neighbour who grew papaya. As part of the Colombian peace negotiations in 2016, he had received a small parcel of land near Tierralta, a tiny town in the region of Córdoba, where Morelos was born. This area of the country is notably fertile and was a territory fiercely fought over by opposing cartels and the government. He suspected that where he grew his fruit had seen a much bloodier past. ‘There was so much violence in Tierralta, and there still is today,’ Morelos says over a video call from her studio in Bogotá, the room behind her full of plants. ‘On the lands once controlled by paramilitaries, there were places where they buried their victims – students of the universities, teachers, leftists. These lands were given away after the peace deal.’ The grim situation had a profound effect on the artist. This story impacted my relationship with the land, because there were corpses down there, becoming organic matter, which was feeding plants, the fruit of which we would eat, not knowing what they had been fed by. There is a constant cycle of cannibalism in nature.’

The role soil plays in the cycle of life and death, has been the 58-year-old’s subject for over a decade now, expressed in vast architectural installations: dark mud-packed structures that visitors can enter, the gloom heightening the senses as they navigate their way through. These aren’t morbid spaces, however; there’s something comforting and cocooning to them, not least because the scent of the fragrant cloves and herbs Morelos has introduced to the soil is a powerful, homely, force. When we speak, she is about to travel to London to start the monumental task of installing origo in the Barbican Centre’s Sculpture Court, which, with a circumference of 24 meters, is the first oval work she’s made. The title is Latin for ‘origin’, and Morelos says she is excited about the form because it symbolizes birth.

This latest sculpture will be womblike, she explains, a sense of wonder animating the typically soft poetic cadence of her voice. ‘I wanted to talk about this womb, where your origin is, in a three-dimensional way, because before you had a body, you existed as a spirit. The womb of your mother is a portal where your spirit enters and gets incarnated, that place is an oval.’ According to Morelos, our birth, however, like her neighbor’s papaya, is fertilized by the inevitability of death. ‘I like that the word ‘origo’ starts and ends with an O – an oval. [Our ending] is also an origin, to another state of matter. When you die, your body, your molecules, your atoms, go to feed other forms of life. Your body expands, through the flies, the mushrooms, through soil, into space.’

‘Our atoms have died and come back to life so many times since the origin of this planet,’ she continues. ‘They have always been mutating, changing form. origo is a womb, within another womb, within another womb: the womb of the Barbican, within the womb of London, within the womb of the island of Great Britain, and this island is in the womb of planet Earth, which is in the womb of space.’

This will be Morelos’s first major project in the UK and underlines the recent acceleration in her career. Her path to artmaking, however, was by no means assured. The artist’s parents ran a small shop in Tierralta, selling the few products that the townsfolk didn’t farm themselves, while her grandmother, descended from the Emberá people, lived next door, and was a curandera, a traditional healer. ‘She lived with her animals; the chickens were inside the house,’ Morelos recalls. ‘She taught us her ancestral traditions and knowledge. For me the figures of the curandera and the artist are the same.’ Morelos compares her childhood to the setting of Gabriel García Márquez’s great magic-realist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which follows multiple generations of a Colombian family living in Macondo, the village they’ve built. ‘I was born in paradise, a land full of yellow butterflies, in a town that might be thought similar to Macondo,’ she says. ‘But violence came, fear arrived, pain arrived.’ Her region has long been a ‘red zone’ in the six-decade conflict that has pitted government forces, far-right paramilitary groups, crime syndicates, and left-wing guerrillas against each other – a war that has seen over 450,000 deaths.

In 1987, Morelos moved to Cartagena, to escape the worst of the violence and to study art, before settling in Bogotá after her graduation. The conflict became the subject of her earliest work, De lo que soy (What I am of) (1995), a series of blood-red, volcanic paintings on unstretched canvas. This was followed by the long-running series ‘Color Que Soy’ (The Color I Am) (1999–2002), an evolving installation of paintings depicting coffins in different skin tones. ‘When we die, we are all equal,’ she reflects. ‘People would always come in, and look for their own skin color, and I would say they were looking for their own corpse.’ 

In 2010, Morelos began introducing the reddish clay of Colombian earth to her series ‘Eva’, its title suggesting paradise spoiled. Then, at the 2013 Salón Nacional de Artistas in Medellín, she presented her first floor work using soil – a geological installation of dozens of earth-covered jagged wooden fragments. The material has dominated her practice since. At the 2022 Venice Biennale, Morelos built Earthly Paradise, a mazelike work of soil, clay, fabrics, fibers, and other organic matter, which brought her greater international attention; she began working with Marian Goodman Gallery soon after. Last year, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, she created a house-like structure, Madre (Mother) (2025), whose roof sprouted green shoots during the course of the exhibition. 

The soil the artist uses is always local to the venue, partly because she is interested in its formal variation – its tone, thickness, or stickiness, and how it reacts to her sculpting hands – but also the fact that it allows her to explore the historical and political context of where she is showing. ‘Land receives all the debris of life, but soil transforms it into food for other forms of life. The land where you were born, received all its history as something material,’ she says to me in reference to Britain and its colonial history. ‘We are always interacting with soil: with pain, with love, with the violence that happened.’

The political side of Morelos’s works is subtler now, especially as her career has become more international. Gone are the bloody, angry reds of her first two decades as an artist. While more ambitious in scale, installations like origo promise something more sensual, spiritual even. She says she wants them to be inviting, to be enjoyed. ‘Contemporary art is orientated to the educated elite, those who can read its language; I want my work to be perceived by the body, because the body has other kinds of intelligence,’ she says. The history she now addresses is on an existential scale, an understanding of life’s fragility born of the violence she has witnessed. ‘You can dig and find the physical fragments of history,’ she continues. ‘The existence of human life is very short however, and the existence of the earth is very long.’