I craft intersections between weaving, painting, assemblage, and sculpture.
As a result, I make...
tesaduras, (to tighten)
enredaduras, (to entangle)
and ligaduras. (to connect)
Through these actions, I secure, strengthen, complicate, and integrate textural surfaces to one another. I trace the interconnections between different textile techniques that traverse la Cordillera de los Andes in South America and engage with the language of weaving as a form for storytelling. My work holds reflexive layers of my Colombian-American experience as it converses with ancestral knowledge and considers the healing benefits of textile art making processes, evident in the work of expressive arts therapists, art educators, clinical research, and writers. Through the intrinsic power of cloth, I unravel movement by physically giving into the exertion of the process. I utilize organic material, fabricated objects, natural and synthetic fibers in ways that become terrains in and of themselves allowing me to thread the autobiographical through the wider communal fabric of the familial. This threading situates me in social grounds as I grapple with constructions of femininity, reimagine ideas of borders, and question what is natural, unnatural, and the layered tensions these oppositions hold.
My relationship to craft digests how its global footprints have influenced movements for social change, empowered women, their communities, and encompass a collective memory that draws from people’s reality and their imagination. I coil color, stitch imagery, and interlace forms that destabilize hierarchical constructions between sentiment and logic; coevolving them both chromatically and in shared spatial dimensions. These visual climes are titled in lyrical play and allude to the poetics of salsa music that forms part of my caleña upbringing. I internalize language as signifiers to impermanence and make tactile arrangements that feel fluid and fixed. I hold movement in place to halt time; so, it documents the undocumented.