Drawings
On-going series:
✦ Tongues and Flowers: Series of drawings portraying flowers and insects. Colored pencils on paper.
✦ Drippin’ : Series of drawings narrating shape-shifting fantasies of insects and their erotic encounters. Colored pencils/ink on paper
The series of drawings Tongues and Flowers came through my interest in looking into 17th and 18th century still life paintings of imperial and colonial countries. I believe those portraits can give us a glimpse not only of how the concept of nature was built in Western societies but also how the ideas of what it means to be (and not to be) human were being configured. I am interested in how colonial processes were also being portrayed through these paintings, like an underlayer that comes to the surface with more clarity over time, confusing the contours of the calm figures portrayed on top. There is no innocence in still life paintings, but a static depiction of violence. Most of the flowers that were being portrayed back then were foreign, meaning that access to them was extremely exclusive and therefore only available to the upper class. The same class that during those times was profiting from their imperial trades and colonies. But with the trade of beautiful flowers and bouquets came along new pests, the intruding and disruptive figure of unwanted insects. Insects are also depicted in those paintings as vanishing witnesses of non-human life, as carriers of a secret that cannot be heard as they sing on the threshold of the violent binary that is being depicted. Insects are usually removed from their inherited quiescence and placed as decorative jewellery of a stolen and bare nature. They are placed as fake signatures of consent. What I intent to explore in my version of still life drawings are the whispered songs of kinship through the shape-shifting bodies of insects that represent for me a source of inspiring desire.