My work begins with feeling like a tourist in the place your family is from. These past four years I've been fortunate to visit Colombia every summer, and each return came with a feeling of disorientation: the landscapes familiar but changed, my relationship to it shifting with every year I spent away. This disorientation is directly linked to my anxiety about climate change, specifically ecosystems that are changing or disappearing, and I process these feelings through painting.
My process starts with my camera roll. I reference photographs from trips and then collage and transform them through surreal and symbolic imagery. This tension between the observed and the imagined draws on the Latin American literary movement Magical Realism, where the extraordinary quietly coexists with the everyday. My painting Pozo del Amor / Love in Various Forms is inspired by ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodblock tradition of "pictures of the floating world," which differs from the strict perspective and conventions of academic European landscape painting. To me, Colombia has always invoked that sense of a floating world: beautiful, temporally unstable, distant and close.
Trees appear throughout my work as sentient with equal or greater visual weight as human figures. My landscapes are informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome — which defines identity as something non-hierarchical, spreading through multiple pathways rather than growing from a single root. The ambiguous, overlapping environments in my paintings reflect my tenuous grasp on identity: whether it's my cultural background or frankly the confusion and clumsiness of my early 20s.
Ecology and political economy intertwine in this body of work. My painting Mama Coca highlights that drug trafficking is one of the leading drivers of deforestation in the Amazon, yet Narco imagery is often sensationalized, and this ecological impact is largely ignored.