Luna Negra, Mother Mold series

Luna Negra obscures a slurry of intimate ephemera and environmental waste into a cast of domestic construction materials. A discarded fruit sack veil serves as a surgical mesh for the artist's purple face, nested within the uterus of a blackened, pregnant body cast with tropical foliage and fake funerary flowers. A vintage Mexican serape drizzles periwinkle liquid through the figure's backbone, emerging as a loincloth from it's birth canal. Reflecting on the life and death cycles depicted in ancestral liberation mythologies, the extant is simultaneously a figure and a landscape alarming and alluring the viewer with Flora Auras palm weavings reminiscent of Equatorial carnival celebrations, and mummification rituals. The second layer of the fertility votive figure has a translucent glow-in-the dark resin that conjures moonlight reflecting on the ocean: an eerie reminder of the irregular tides of tropical gentrification that threaten Miami's most vulnerable neighborhoods populated by Black and Brown families.

Mother Mold monuments document conflicting climate and reproductive health crisis in the Americas by casting fertile LGBTQIA+ BIPOC families in a collaborative Mama Spa Botanica workshop to celebrate ancient millenary traditions ranging from mummification, matriarchal infrastructure and critical resource mapping. In collaboration with doulas, midwives, botanicas, Santeras, Manbos, herbalists, griots, quipucamayocs & advocates, the workshop honors the wisdom of verbal, culinary, tactile, maternal millenary traditions as diasporic technologies resisting aggressive AI with Ancestral Intelligence. Composed of intimate waste, environmental ephemera and domestic construction materials, the Mother Mold fertility effigies reclaim material refuse as maternal refuge to transgress structural violence in American mythology. Restoring divinity and dignity to vulnerable diasporas in the US since 2007, the project exhumes the complicated historical, political and geographic context wherein conquering the tropical landscape and procreative bodies stem from a colonial Eurocentric legacy.

Recalling "Virgen Gruta" 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 the "Spice Trade". Inhabiting its endemic environment, the fertility votive is made by upcycling consumer and climate waste, then cast into a slurry of domestic construction materials within a Mother Mold mummy cast of LGBTQIA+ BIPOC families. The works reconstitute internalized stigmas made in and of our bodies, our landscape and our movement.