21 was my first big creative jump. Now architecture is more of a companion. My work relates to it in the way that an old tapestry relates to the wall.” 20 Amaral’s exploration of larger-scale works culminated in El gran muro (The Great Wall) (1976, fig. 7), a six-story commission for the Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Following the completion of this piece, Amaral began to retreat from such archi- tectural works, returning to a more human-sized scale. The 1980s then launched one of the most prolific periods of Amaral’s career, her most prominent work of the era being the Alquimia (Alchemy) series (pp. 64–65, 75, 84–87, 105) . First exhibited in 1983 at the Modern Masters Tapestries in New York City, the initial thirteen works in the series are based on the proportion of the human figure and feature heavy use of gesso and gold leaf atop individu- al woven tabs. Amaral describes how “gold has such a wonderful way of reflecting light. It is magical, mysterious, even though I don’t like to use those words to describe it.” 21 Amaral was inspired to use gold after a visit to the studio of the British ceramist Lucie Rie, where she saw a vase mended in the style of kintsugi , a Japanese technique that beautifies breaks in ceramics with lacquer and gold. However, Colombia’s long and complicated history with gold must also be taken into consideration when discussing Amaral’s work. The folklore of El Dorado—whom Spanish colonists described as a mythical leader of the Muisca people, a Colombian indigenous group renowned for exquisite gold work—propelled the Spanish to invade the land in search of this precious metal and to exploit and conquer its people. Even today, gold remains a constant presence in Colombian culture and society. Museo del Oro (The Gold Museum) in Bogotá widely documents the history of indigenous cultures that worked with the material, as well as its enduring relevance today. Through her more recent work, Amaral continues to reinvent her relationship with architecture, space, and the grid, as seen in the installations of Estelas (Stelae) (2007) . Stelae, or upright stone slabs often made for commemoration, have been a sculptural inspiration for Amaral since the late 1990s. “I want to achieve a sense of floating in space, as though memory were suspended in a mystical space,” Amaral says of this newer practice. “Space has [a] relationship to tapestry. My tapestries belong to walls. They exist. I want them to feel like a presence, but I don’t want that presence to be an intrusion. I want them to become almost transparent. To be presence, to be wall, and to be weightless, floating, ingravido .” 22 Amaral’s country house outside of Bogotá features an installation of several stone stelae in the front garden (fig. 8). Their surfaces are textured with various lichen and plant life, and their shape is representative of the fiber works of the same name. She writes that the Estelas (Stelae) “retook some ideas of the free-standing, large-volume fiber struc- tures I had made during the late seventies and early eighties. . . . But now I had squeezed volume materially into a lithic surface. I think of them as stones full of space, each one a presence full of secrets. Many together, like mounds of stones or rocks, point to an answer, an unknown order, a hidden history.” 23 The fiber Estelas (various dates, pp. 126–127) are made of individual woven squares that have been stiffened by gesso. Installed in tight