Most of my work deals with the condition of woman in contemporary society. Parting from a concept and using a minimum of elements, I am frequently interested in working with unconventional materials—makeup, hair, perfume—to make projects that question our relationships with others and with ourselves, and to confront my fears by working obsessively in an intricate and laborious manner. Over the years I have used a variety of media, such as video-performance, installation, drawing, prints, artist books, embroidery, and weaving.

My art career began in Guatemala 23 years ago, where I was interested in focusing on the role of woman in its patriarchal society. Soon after I moved to New York City at the end of 2000, I began to pay attention to beauty standards in a more critical way, which compelled me to experiment with non-conventional paint in past video-performances—lipstick, nail polish, and mascara—where I question our obsession with body image by playing along with women's beauty rituals, performing them in exaggerated ways. With repetitive gestures I apply makeup continuously for one or two hours, reflecting our attraction to makeup and its power of seduction; or for one hour I depilate my pubis continuously, questioning the pressure to have a pre-pubescent appearance.

For more than 17 years, I have been working with embroidery and weaving in a contemporary way using non-traditional materials such as hair, to talk about issues such as aging, beauty, DNA/heredity, identity, individual expression, and community.

Instead of the traditional thread used in hand-embroidery and weaving, I use “hair” to explore line, creating drawings and metaphors about passing of time; such as an on-going life project, a self-portrait started when I turned 33 years old, where each year I embroider my age using my gray hair on a black silk.

My interest in working with weaving comes from having grown up in Guatemala, where there is a strong textile tradition. Lately, I have been interested in combining traditional weaving techniques with non-traditional elements, such as hair, to create this new body of work of "hair weaves," where I collect hair donated by the public and my own, and by using a small portable loom I weave it into a larger piece, uniting and merging the variety of lives and identities of all participants.

This project is about inclusion and diversity of the community through a celebration of hair and individual expression, and by intertwining together our hair, to create a communal portrait. My intention is to create and exhibit these types of community weavings in as many different institutions as possible.



Last updated: May 2022