Chiminigagua Oya Ogbun Thinker (Coralina Triptych)

Sculpture slurry ingredients made from intimate waste, environmental debris, domestic construction materials:
charcoal, coral, sea sponges, chancletas, woven palm fronds, palm stamens, palm husks, wall insulation foam, building studs, floor resin, industrial adhesive, interior latex paint, landscape marking paint, spray paint, nail salon paint, synthetic hair weave, human hair, fingernails

Chiminigagua Oya Ogbun Thinker (Coralina Triptych) is a procreative effigy figure composed of intimate waste, environmental ephemera and domestic construction materials grotesquely arranged in sedimentary layers of bruised black and purple pigment. The work's title draws from Muisca and Orisha dieties whose domain involves life cycle creation and destruction, as a memento monument of liberation mythologies. Part of a triptych installation the artist created after collecting littoral litter for 4 years along the seashore in Miami beach with her daughter. Dead coral, sponges, chancletas, palm husks, palm stamens shells and straws are among the refuse ingredients in the sculpture the artist refers to as "gifts from Yemaya" that were reclaimed on Miami beach after climate pulses including hurricanes, tropical storms and King moon tides.

The process of creating the figure into a sculpture is the result of a birthing justice collaborative reproductive health project called the Mama Spa Botanica. Cast from a combination of pregnant people's body parts including the artist and her BIPOC neighbors (Catherina who appears most frequently in the Mother Mold series), the intimate and environmental debris is formed into the Mother Mold prototype and layered with multiple pours of domestic construction materials.

Historically, the work imagines survival strategies from intersecting forces of global South liberation mythologies and American colonial legacies. The work conjures the Oriashas Oya (who rules the dead, is involved with the ancestors, cemeteries, and wind), Ogun (whose patriarchal polarity is present in his healing and destruction abilities watching over war, labor, children and families) and the Muisca Chiminagagua (creator god who made light and Earth by sending two black birds into the skies to illuminate the cosmos). Woven Old Man and coconut palm fronds archive the funerary and domestic architecture traditions of island nations ranging from the Caribbean to the South Pacific where the artist first learned roof thatching membrane techniques that were also used as headstones to commemorate the transition of her ancestors. The pregnant figure is a mirror image with two sides of itself (one pointing up, the other pointing down), recalling the Double Consciousness Infinity Mirror series within the Linea Negra photographs. Their bellies are ripped open and divided at the sculpture's center as the insulation foam expanded and contracted facing the Earth's weathering elements.