I’m often looking at a personal textile as an intimate collection of skin cells, body hair, dust mites, blood, and semen. They are honest representations of our animal body and its vulnerability. My work speaks to a canon of feminist thought specific to South America, often as a practice of futility with archaic technologies. I think of my grandma in Colombia, making clothes for seven children with a manual sewing machine on a farm, no ability to throw away and waste a piece of fabric. As well as the sweat and toil on the clothing my mother wore as a child in unpaid agricultural labor on a coffee plantation. Or the deeply physical memories of murdered relatives, surrounded by textiles that held them and witnessed events in burnt flesh, blood, and stab wounds recorded in a cotton shirt and bed linens. While the objects I make non explicitly reflect this reality of a ravaged body on the tilt towards decomposition, they express a certain hope and lightness. As death, while painful, is a necessary process that makes room for new life. 

In the process of making, I am most drawn to natural materials in my environment and waste products. Things like old fabric scraps, food waste, and foraged fiber. I aim to use materials to their full potential in fiber art, and tie my making with an agrarian practice of tending to land with deep care as a person who comes from land that is deeply scarred. I lean into the physicality of what it takes to grow something from the soil, to mend something, and make it desirable. This process is important to me because it is a defiant act of making space for healing for myself and others, and for mourning our family and ancestors. I want to elevate overlooked materials into something precious and vulnerable that allows my audience to rethink what they consider waste, and what parts of themselves they consider shameful.