ongoing body of work
2023 - present

Rooted in both indigenous Mesoamerican craft and European art historical traditions of landscape, still life, and portraiture, my practice is, like me, trapped in the in-between of two identities forced to co-exist. In my work, I document and seek to understand how our identities, especially as displaced people, are informed by our connections and disconnections to place. 

This body of work revolves around material and site-specificity: an inquiry into our nostalgic attachments to place. I am interested in how I can extend contact with a place and its private associations by incorporating that place into objects with which we live day to day. I collect site-specific wild clay, minerals, rocks, and plants from places with personal meaning to me (Mexico, Maine, Texas, Greece, to name a few) with which I create ceramic sculpture. Primarily metaphorical self-portraits — a nod to how we are an accumulation of all the places we have been and all the things we have seen — the objects are also multicultural hybrids: souvenir-talisman-milagros which conjure specific memories and connections to place, making the intangible tangible when seen or, ideally, touched. Through these intentional engagements with memory and the natural world, I blur the line between the self and nature, allowing displaced plants, landscapes, and fruits to become protagonists with complex histories, cultures, and attachments that inevitably begin to mirror our own.

The feminist fruit vessels — frutos / as / x —  intentionally aim to disrupt or queer restrictive and rigid definitions of identity by expanding and interrogating our ideas of what fundamentally constitutes a living being with all its complex trappings: gender, agency, preferences, and attachments. The work is simultaneously surrealist / utopian and realistic / representational, an optimistic Magical-Realist forecast of how we might redefine life, and therefore expand our capacities for empathy and connection in the future.