A year ago, I took a mold of Zoraida’s feet. She thought her feet were ugly. I think they are beautifully worn. They hold her hardships, her stories from Guatemala, the streets she walked on, and the histories she forgot. A lineage is a grouping of memories that is built off of fragmented stories. The colloquial term “Chapin”... I was always curious about the origin of this term. I found out that it pertains to a colonial shoe that nobility wore in the 16th C. These were ridiculously tall clog-like shoes called chopines, elevating the bodies of the wearers above their subjects and also separating their skin from the dirty soil. This piece appropriates the colonial symbol and folds it upon itself, to play with its irony and contradictions: shoes, feet, subjects, and earth.
Chapines (Chopines)
2024
cast terra cotta
Chiquita
2025
Welded steel, ceramic, beeswax, rivets
The banana company and its reign over Latin America. The queen of fruits, America’s obsession, and the pinnacle of labor.
I specifically think of the plantation workers who face very high exposure to toxic pesticides while processing bananas. Many of them including children, live nearby the plantations and are at high risk of health problems because of the polluted air and water wells. Workers carry bundles of bananas on their backs and hips that can weigh over 100 Ibs, all for our “daily potassium intake” and açaí bowls.
Razorwire
2025
welded steel, wax, black iron oxide
72”x 48”
I committed to the painstaking process of assembling a hand-made razorwire, as a rosary/tasbih prayer strings of beads. Razorwire deployed in the gallery as a ghost, a line floating in space, like a found object literally extracted from the war field. To challenge perceptions and meanings of craft, the violence of objects, the making of artifacts of domination, of control and surveillance.
Fruits of Labor
2024
Beeswax, ceramic, rawhide, paper
Chiquita banana, banana corps are another active colonial regime, exploiters of people and grabbers of land. I see beeswax as a product of labor and rawhide as an echo of the body
Cyclical border
2024
Steel, rust
68 in. x 68 in. x 28 in.
I deconstructed the border, transforming it into a circular system that amplifies the cyclical nature of violence and harm that is perpetuated by the construction of border walls everywhere.
Thank you to everyone who helped me with this piece
Harness
2023
Beeswax, cotton, corn husk, gauze
The evolutions of cacao, the movement of cacao, industrialization of cacao. The meaning for it in Mesoamerica, within Indigeneity. A fruit to harness healing,celebration, mourning, currency, and trade. Made me think of chocolate and how rarely we think of the cacao pod. The lengths this pod have traveled to satisfy the western taste, but also the memories, wounds, and traumas left on the people who care and rely on this fruit and for the ones who have no choice but to toil for it.
Gauze originates from Gaza I learned.
“This morning I learned The English word gauze (finely woven medical cloth) Comes from the Arabic word Ghazza Because Gazans have been skilled weavers for centuries
I wondered then
how many of our wounds have been dressed because of them
and how many of theirs have been left open because of us”
- Em Berry
allegorical objects, instruments for healing. how lucky am I to make these.
Pine rosin to seal, beeswax to purify, copper to radiate, accordion to breathe and to hear. cord to connect, to wrap, and tie. Skin to be.
how do we not stay helpless within a time of such atrocity and injustice? we use our mind, we use our voices, we use our hands.
