A turquoise and cerulean figure ascends, washed up amidst excavated coralina stone composing the bedrock of the Caribbean. A syncretic pieta between an exotic, synthetic mother and her endemic habitat, the maternal materiality of nature conditions the figure's return to their extant, endemic landscape. The natural and man made materials composed along with the title- refer to the translation between gendered geographies and spiritual traditions of Caribbean cultures surviving the Bermuda Triangle's disappearance.

Apariciones: Virgen Gruta (2020-present) photographs render fertility effigy altars of Mother Mold monuments in their fecund habitat to reclaim American material refuse as a vernacular, maternal refuge. Venerating entropic life and death cycle rituals across indigenous equatorial cultivars, the vibrant retablos are apparitions of vulnerable, yet unvanquished interior psychic landscapes overcoming assimilation and species collapse. Welcoming and warning viewers to the fabled biography of plantation labor farms and botanica pharmacies, the works excavate biological impacts on melanated, chosen families whose endangered plantology wisdom transgresses health and habitat disparities. Digging in personal and global South and equatorial archives over 2 decades, the artist renders the geopolitics of gender, displacement and land sovereignty emerging within the syncretic sites in their familiar, queer and quaint, endemic or exotic landscape.

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. Emboldened by its tropical habitat, a pregnant effigy figure emerges to embody our collective refuse as a site for procreative refuge. 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.

The Mother Mold monument is composed of intimate waste, environmental ephemera cast in domestic construction materials including: Guatemalan serape fabric, alpaca & llama quipus, braided bamboo fiber, cotton balls, nylon rope, iridescent film, Cuban “colonia” perfume bottle, turquoise powder, salt, coconut powder, white quinoa, birth control bill cases, vintage abortion pill case, cast jack fruit, building stud, plaster, floor resin, wall insulation foam, interior latex house paint, tropical flowers, plastic funerary plants are raw, processed and discarded materials.

Apariciones: Virgen Gruta (2020-present) photographs render fertility effigy altars of Mother Mold monuments in their fecund habitat to reclaim American material refuse as a vernacular, maternal refuge. Venerating entropic life and death cycle rituals across indigenous equatorial cultivars, the vibrant retablos are apparitions of vulnerable, yet unvanquished interior psychic landscapes overcoming assimilation and species collapse. Welcoming and warning viewers to the fabled biography of plantation labor farms and botanica pharmacies, the works excavate biological impacts on melanated, chosen families whose endangered plantology wisdom transgresses health and habitat disparities. Digging in personal and global South and equatorial archives over 2 decades, the artist renders the geopolitics of gender, displacement and land sovereignty emerging within the syncretic sites in their familiar, queer and quaint, endemic or exotic landscape.