“The “Nudos,” which are among Amaral’s most recent works, are also her most concise. They bring to fruition her long-standing interest in “scaling up of the discrete components of the textile elements,” she remarked in another email. “The beginning of a fabric, the kernel of a textile, is a knot. I wanted to monumentalize this incredible technology.” The comment makes me wonder whether these works might be self-portraits of a kind. Vertically oriented and rising to a hairstyle-like topknot, they certainly could be read as figural. But Amaral says no—she was not thinking about the body when she made them, but about the intrinsic logic of the medium. Rather than self-portraits, then, perhaps it would be better to see them as stat.mes nts of purpose, materialized manifestos, the exclamation marks of a long and amazingly generative career. When it comes to summarizing all she has achieved, it would be hard to put the case better than Amaral does herself: “I wanted to make the thread and the knot more visible, giving them the weight, the importance they deserve.”