Starting again
It seems like I’m starting to accept the idea that my art production comes and goes. In this case, it has picked up again after a year and a half of being dormant. This took a lot of effort and time devoted to regaining my artistic confidence, and more than anything regaining the joy I feel in creating it.
In 2017, I created my last piece dealing with the Mexico-US border, a subject that garnered a lot of attention and found me spots in art shows. I stopped working on this topic because I made peace with it as it related to my identity, and I honestly didn’t want to deal with it under the hostile political climate at the time. It was too tiring and the little energy I had I wanted to use for myself. I wanted to start exploring through my artwork, my emotional baggage, my inner barriers. So in my 2019 piece, “Sol, Ella y yo,” I learned about my mom and grandmother’s personal lives in an attempt to see what perspectives and emotions have been passed on to or carried by me.
My grandma Sol, my mom and I
The current piece I’m working on is completely about myself. When I started, the only thing I knew was that I wanted to keep using the video/sound technique and dirt from the last piece and give it dimension, maybe using water in the same way I did for the piece “Playas.” For several months, I spent a lot of time imagining a circle made out of dirt that would open into something deeper and beautiful. I didn’t know how I would manifest it, or why. I didn’t yet have the energy to figure it out.
While that was happening, I finished reading the Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante, which I loved. During an interview she said “… when I write, I draw on parts of myself, of my memory, that are agitated, fragmented that make me uncomfortable. A story, in my view, is worth writing only if its core comes from here.” After reading this, I started creating a list of the things that make me uncomfortable, and two things that struck me the most were my mild hearing loss, and the pain that comes and goes in my uterus. These things make me feel so much uncertainty and nervousness about what will happen in the future.
After undergoing a pelvic ultrasound to check for endometriosis, I found the images captured—along with the use of sound to create the images—to be fascinating. I was able to obtain the images of my uterus and decided to use them as a starting point for my new artwork. My hope with this process is that I’ll find beauty in myself and peace with the physical and emotional pain I feel in that part of the body. Also, the yoni is a place for nurturing and creation, among many others things, so it felt like the right place to restart my art-making.
Checking the ultrasound images through different filters
For the time being, and to make things easier on myself, I’m calling the current work “preciosa” (precious). My grandmother has always called me “preciosa,” which reminds me of my own beauty and worth.