Statement
My art practice began in my country of birth (Spain), and was rooted in drawing. As I moved to the United States in my teens, it expanded and currently encompasses painting, printmaking, papermaking, textiles and digital collage. It reflects a tactile sensibility and an affinity for layering, patterning and ornamentation. Throughout all of my work, paper and fabric have remained as the central connecting elements in my practice, and the main driving interests in my material research.
Thematically my artwork was originally focused on the interaction among the female body, advertising, and fashion, and it viewed the female body as a repository of a range of cultural and psychological experiences. I was interested in how fashion and female display are implicated in the construction of a female identity, along with political and social messages regarding popular perceptions of female beauty. My visual vocabulary included motifs referencing struggle, renewal, joy, and a fascination with beauty, biology, myth, and belief.
Over time my interest shifted towards the formal relationships between clothing and the female body, considering the body and the layers wrapping it – skin and garment – as a meditation on identity and self. In that context, I regarded the garment as a “second skin” which simultaneously hides and reveals or, alternatively, a carcass that echoes the body in its absence. I incorporated motifs and imagery that relate to the body and garment, sometimes conceiving the two as one, intermingling both into a single organism: the body as self / the garment as self.
Recently I have become invested in representing the female body in a different way altogether. No longer concerned by its outer shell, I am inspired by imagined visions of its insides, microbiology, and a pulsing emotional and spiritual inner landscape. I consistently conceptualize it as connected to nature, and to perennial and inexplicable forces that guide and shape it, thus offering a less concrete and finite way of understanding the body.