Botanica Beluosa was my first installation. A mashup of paintings and soft sculpture exploring symbiotic relationships and an animistic worldview. Every creature had a name: Good Fungus & Bad Fungus, Snake Rabbit Root, Ghost Plant to name a few. You can feel the Sonoran Desert where I grew up mingling with Bay Area flora like the Coast Live Oak, a weird little ecosystem of its own making.
Living Works V1: “Look/Don’t Look” is about that tug-of-war between wanting to share and wanting to hide. My process starts with ripping or cutting up my own paintings, then sewing them back together, layering in embroidery and tiny beads. I keep the scraps and loose threads (the “don’t look” parts) and try to find a place for them too. It’s messy, honest, and a little weird, but that’s the point: showing what’s usually left out.
