As an act of spiritual reimagining, my practice gathers natural organic pigments and ancestral regenerative symbolism to revive our relationship to land using drawings and installations.  In my recent work, I resist systems of exploitation and policing of natural resources and move towards a sustainable practice of  cultivating plants to be transformed as materials for art and learning ancestral pictorial-writings to imagine a new way of relating to the land.  Every plant grown, harvested and handled activates an energy I gather to form a narrative on perseverance.

In “luz en lo obscuro” [light in the dark] series, I draw upon the protected native ecosystem of the Illinois prairie at Ragdale and use natural pigments harvested from South Texas to create an imagining of growth and hope.  My site specific installation uses the sunroof in the Chandler Studio at Ragdale Residency to activate metaphors of persisting in times of darkness.  My markings carry an activated powdered charcoal where various densities of particles are present.  This activation carries a symbolic gesture of detoxing and purifying the landscape and marking an emerging imagining of native plants, animals connected by a writing of ancestral proverbs.

“sanacion violeta, rezos” [violet healing, prayers] series draws a symbolic interconnection between myself and nature using the color violet, a color known by ancestral curanderes, healers, as the ultimate spiritual color of healing.  I draw my hands to gesture an embrace of various plants I have grown or harvested and position the hands holding the root or flower to form an Ollin, an ancestral symbol of movement in nature.  As a way to heal, I use the ancestral teachings of color and symbolism to revolutionize my connection to nature, an act of contemplating how nature’s cycles fundamentally heal through a motion of transformation and growth.