My ceramic sculptures of transgender, feminine, and immigrant bodies resist the impulse to categorize. They embrace ambiguity and invite nuance over prescription, mourning over monumentality, and care over classification. Our modern identities function through delocality, requiring one to choose from options that reflect only the colonist himself. Drawing on Veronica Gago’s insights in Feminist International, these artworks examine patriarchal connections between power, territory, and bodies. Considering the body as a territory, I critique our dominant American value systems and the narratives perpetuated by traditional portraiture.

 

The figure becomes a ground, and thus, a site to gather the broader narratives of cultural erasure and identity loss in America today. Immigrant and marginalized communities are not only disenfranchised but systematically erased from public consciousness. Carrying the lived identities of being transgender and an undocumented family in the United States, my work foregrounds the emotional, political, and spiritual dimensions of making a home within political precarity. Clay holds its ancestral roots in contested lands and bears the lamination of identities led by colonial expansion. The gestural nature of my sculpting process entangles with the concept of erasure, holding liminal space between the human body and clay as a body of land. Each sculpture becomes a narrative of survival—of how families endure within systems designed to fracture and erase them.

 

Elements derived from historical craft practices traditionally labeled as “women’s work” are frequently woven through these sculptures. By integrating decorative and domestic handicrafts, such as quilting, cross-stitching, crochet, and weaving, into these works, I deliberately introduce craft languages and legacies into the patriarchal realm of the gallery space. Through these practices steeped in American history, the sculptures become vessels of memory, survival, and protest.

 

How do we create modern accountability for our histories? What does it look like to critique these histories? In my practice, I search for how we repair our collective disembodiment from ourselves, each other, and the land.