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General statement
I have sought to explore the meanings of my own personal history. I grapple in my art with my own past, which included abandonment and exile. But I have also sought to go beyond the merely personal. Intimate narratives of pain, loss, and hope are universal. They are part of the human experience and surface in all eras and cultural geographies. Issues of abandonment, isolation, sexism, political freedom, war, and dislocation have for millennia haunted the human psyche. Through the exploration of different media I have sought to confront these issues and communicate my understanding to anyone experiencing my work.
I grew up in Ecuador in a non-traditional household, always filled with a longing for something else. My father, loving and nurturing, had another family in the US and was away. My mother cared for me in the home of her parents in Quito. When I was thirteen she fell in love and started a new life away from me. Although surrounded with love, I felt like an orphan. Isolation made me seek involvement within my community, gradually devoting more and more time to politics. My involvement, however, occurred at a time when the search for radical social change in Ecuador was met by the government with a systematic policy of torture and disappearance. I had to flee. Paradoxically and perversely, politics led to exile, and to a new round of loneliness and alienation. This time around, however, I found in art the means and idioms to rebuild my life.
My artists books are containers, depositories of personal stories. They have evolved from two-dimensional surfaces to having solid, yet fragile structures that can be manipulated and therefore "read" by the viewer. These works have a more rough quality in my use of materials such as wood and raffia. Aesthetically, these materials point to or intimate gender with their contrast of rough versus soft. Again, traditional basketry, crocheting, and sewing are employed, techniques often considered woman's work. Here sacred memories reveal their mysteries under the guise of beautiful materials. Yet, some of the subject matter documents the horror and brutality I experienced in Quito.
The Cucas/Paper Doll Series confronts those feelings of vulnerability, rage, powerlessness, and loneliness. They also go beyond my own experiences as a child. They try to project upon situations, and circumstances that could happen to any woman growing up. Each work is an attempt to create a story about this, to establish a visual form of communication of what my personal relationship to the world is. Paper dolls and photographs from my childhood, lace, embroidery, weaving and basketry all come together in a syntheses of textured studies of skirts, blouses, and garments. Texture is "painted" with machine and hand stitches, for sewing is firmly associated with personal memories of my grandmother and all those women who brought me up. Each Cuca celebrates my cultural identity and experiences of emotional struggle as a child. These are small works, built upon layers of materials that invite the viewer to take the time to investigate and unravel their meaning.
My work, however, is not localized to women's craft but rather expands and takes ownership of materials and scale that at one time were considered part of the male domain. My public sculpture for the Woman's Pavilion Pan Am 2001 Public Art Project employs the use of copper sheets over an armature of steel wire mesh to create a large scale version of a skirt from the Paper Doll series. The skirt that once provided shelter and symbolized nurturing for a child now has structural integrity and strength. The rich aesthetic of feminine crafts that is so important to me is honored in this work, yet the issue of gender associated with whether crafts can be considered art is now a mute point.
Please go to the following link to read about my Installation work:
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