THE WORK

Habgood Filler make constructed wall-based works in which relief and surface are used as structural rather than decorative elements.

The current body of work follows two extended periods of research in Colombia. Time spent in the vernacular architecture of Barichara and Salento - rammed earth, lime render, hand-cut stone, painted timber - and trekking in the Andes established the material vocabulary: built rather than depicted surface, colour weathered into a wall rather than applied to it. Alongside this ran a long engagement with pre-Columbian and indigenous collections in Bogotá and Medellín, and with the landscape of the Sierra Nevada at Tayrona.

The work does not illustrate what was seen. It follows a line running from Torres-García's constructive universalism and Anni Albers's study of Andean structure: European modernist abstraction tested against a geometry that predates it, and altered by the encounter.