Artist Statement
Working with textiles, fibers, and paper becomes a meditative process that mirrors the delicate complexity of human experience—including my own. My Colombian heritage, rich in embroidery and craftsmanship traditions, deeply influences my work. My perspectives are shaped by cultural transition, beauty standards, and personal encounters with domestic abuse. Repurposed garments and paper are central to my practice: when a garment/paper that once structured a body is reduced to scraps and reconstructed, it represents a body receiving a second chance—a testament to our capacity for metamorphosis.
Bio
I was born in 1990 in Cartago, a small Colombian town that's famous for being the embroidery capital of the country. Growing up, I watched the women in my family embroider to make ends meet, and eventually I started doing it too to earn some extra money while I was in school. I graduated from college in 2014 from the School of Visual Arts at UTP with a mayor in painting and a minor education. My illustration-focused practice examined plastic surgery as a beauty standard imposed on women, visually exploring how these procedures have become stereotypical markers of female beauty.
In 2018, with limited English skills, I moved to a small town in Connecticut and, with even fewer job options, started working at a popular coffee shop. I also began babysitting in NYC, spending my week taking trains between New York and Connecticut. It was through childcare that I met a Project Runway runner-up fashion designer. I quickly transitioned from babysitting to working as part of her team of personal assistants and managers of her Tribeca fashion after-school program.
During this period, I experienced grief, divorce, and emotional trauma. Fashion became a creative outlet, and my crafty upbringing started emerging while I came upon an upcycling technique called crumb quilting—a wonderful way to transform fabric scraps into something beautiful!
In 2022, the Guggenheim Museum welcomed me as a teaching artist. Over the following three years, my teaching residency at a primary school in Washington Heights reconnected me to my art practice through working with kids who had recently migrated to New York. Their material experimentation became mine too, and as a community we shared our concepts of home, migration, and identity. Around the same time, other institutions as the Museum of Arts and Design and El Museo del Barrio welcomed me as museum educator.
Crumb quilting became central to my work, and through experimenting with discarded textiles, I began constructing sculptures as tools for processing grief and questioning identity. Now my horizons have expanded, and I'm pursuing my master's degree in Costume Studies at NYU. Textiles have now become a liminal space for my explorations of fashion and art as forms of identity.