I create sculptures and installations with ceramics, found objects, and biomatter. These hybrid objects exist in spaces of transformation, such as a stomach becoming a tree trunk, an intestine becoming a territorial marker, or a pot becoming an anthropomorphic machine. The materials I use, like clay, pinto beans, hair, guajillo peppers, and found objects, arise from memories of my upbringing and my cultural background, like digging my hand into a bucket of raw beans, scraping the yellowing crust of handmade cheese, or kicking the red clumps of dirt off my shoes in my grandfather’s ranch.
My work explores the inner workings of the body and the ways in which it struggles to metabolize the vast array of data that it processes; the complex interplay between the physical and the psychological and the natural and the artificial, alongside the potential for harmony and failure in these relationships. It explores those through systems that drip, strain and dissolve. It is also in contact with concerns such as post-colonization (the effects of colonialism on people and their survival), generational memory, identity, disease and trauma.
I am kin to artists of the Brazilian avant-guard movement of Antropofagia and the surrealist literature of Leonora Carrington. I am interested in the blurring of boundaries between objects, organisms and technology as explored in Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto.” These propositions expand metabolization to the processing and transformation of reality through inward and outward systems, including flow, drip, filtration, stagnation, bacterial growth and decomposition.
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