As a woman, my entrails have always been governed by others. Before I even menstruated for the first time, I was taught to sew, knit, and embroider, only to become a caring wife and exemplary mother: no one asked me if that was my plan. After unexpectedly becoming a mother, all the rebellion against the conservative and religious education I received since childhood furiously exploded. I refused to become what I was trained for. My artistic work became a way of expressing my resistance.
I engage with embroidery as a pictorial medium, exploring ways of deconstructing its traditions to allow for less patterned, more experimental techniques, where color and relief are more than mimesis and practical domestic use. My raw materials turned from classical canvas to discarded objects and surfaces, including lemon bags, old t-shirts, and more recently castoff bed sheets and pillows. With used linens, I seek to connect with radically intimate spaces that store memories of exploration, discovery, and suffering. Such items have witnessed materialized, embodied repression, the byproduct of centuries of indoctrination women have experienced throughout history; but even more importantly, they represent the space of our wildest dreams, utopias of liberation and sisterhood.
