7 These woven fragments are the “words” I use to begin creating landscapes of surfaces, textures, emotions, memories, meanings and connections. In 1970 I spent an afternoon admiring Lucie Rie´s ceramics in her studio in London . There I took special notice (and then bought) a vase which had been fixed. She explained to me that she had highlighted the mending with gold, a tech- nique she credited to Japanese artisans. She considered fixing to be an act of love and respect. This use of gold touched a mysterious place in my mind. Four years later, while living in Paris, I started using gold-leaf in a small group of pieces that I called Complete Fragments . From then on, gold became an important material in my work. My search centered on how I could turn textile into golden surfaces of light . The basic units of linen and cotton that I mentioned before, already had the metaphorical quality of purity asso- ciated with gold. However, in a material sense, the surfaces needed more work to achieve a simpler state. So I started white-washing with gesso to cover and fill the spaces left in the weaving—to stiffen, smooth, cleanse and give body to the units, to heighten the sensation of austerity and to prepare and protect each one ; all this without losing the under- lying woven texture. Later on I found that gesso and stucco allowed me to create inscriptions and bas-reliefs of different simple geometric fig- ures such as suns, spirals, circles and squares that enriched the meaning of these surfaces and endowed themwith a time-less quality, like glyphs and inscriptions do to stones. To mask the dry and abrasive quality that white-washing with gesso gave to these small bodies, I covered them with rice-paper. This also reinforced them and gave them a fluid, organic sheen while always leaving traces of what lies beneath. Finally, I applied the gold-leaf. All these procedures leave their mark. 7. White-washed elements. 6. Complete Fragment with gold-leaf, 1980. 5. Complete Fragment with gold-leaf, 1973 . 8. Elements with gold-leaf stored in bundles.