Luna Miel (Oro)

A gold aura figure nests in the crownshaft of a Sabal Palm, as a syncretic pieta between an exotic, synthetic mother and her endemic habitat. The natural and man made materials composed along with the title- refer to the translation between gendered geographies and spiritual traditions of Caribbean and Andean cultures.

Recalling liberation mythology retablos found in tropical terrains, the work considers the culture of procreation in the Americas- a complicated historical, political, and geographic context wherein conquering the wild landscape, reproductive bodies, and indigenous societies stem from a colonial Eurocentric legacy. Inhabiting its endemic environment, the fertility votive is made by combining intimate ephemera and environmental waste cast into a slurry of domestic construction materials. Monuments to the fertile survivors of man-made and natural disasters, the Mother Mold effigy figures bear the burdens of internalized structural violence made in and of our bodies, our landscape and our movement. Luna Miel (Oro) combines different forms of corn with gold powders to both evoke imagery of the glowing, Byzantine Madonna enthroned along with the legacy of colonial trade harvesting indigenous resources such as maize and gold for imperial industries and commerce. The raw, processed and discarded materials are emboldened by a tropical, pregnant figure to embody our collective refuse as a site for procreative refuge.