I was raised in Caracas in a family of artists. My mother is a visual artist working with video and dance, and my father is a painter’s painter. Since an early age, I was very much involved in the arts, attending contemporary dance classes and taking part in my mum’s videos. This early awareness of the body contributed to it being a central theme in my practice today. The first artworks I produced were fungi macro-landscape photographs taken in the forest where my father lived. Then I jumped to self-portraits and, after some time, guided by a growing feminist interest, I turned to historical research on gender inequality. After I moved to London, I learned more about the Victorian era. It was particularly appealing to me the way women were fighting to become citizens with equal rights. Over the years I developed works about outstanding women of that period.
The first project, titled Orchis (2012), drew on the Suffragettes attack on the Kew Gardens orchid house. Then by 2015, in A Garden for Beatrix, I paid tribute to Beatrix Potter and her findings of fungi. The central piece was a seven-metre-long mural of porcelain sculptures juxtaposed on paper cut-outs of fungi textures. The following year, I produced a giant cyanotype mural made out of health products that were scarce in Venezuela back then, all inspired by Anna Atkins’s work. Titled Inventario Personal (2016), it has been exhibited in Caracas and in London at a show in Photofusion, Brixton, in 2017. For that project I received an ACE [Arts Council England] grant for the arts, and was able to invite Venezuelan photojournalists to show their images, and at the same time activate the local community through workshops and talks.
My work responds to the current crisis but also looks into the past. A dialogue between the self, corporeality and nature keep coming back in my practice. One way this happens is working with ceramics, because of the connection I feel to an ancient material that comes from the soil. Other ways are related to research with a multimedia outcome. Above all, I keep myself open to the flow of energy and ideas the world offers. From a fungi spore to a vast forest, and from the past to present times.