Clay was actually one of the first places where material culture happened.
So there is this very ancient relationship of humans and clay that has accompanied us for many, many years now.
When humans started to decorate their pots and their things, designs and shapes started to be imprinted into the clay pieces.
So many ideas or layers inhabit the clay.
Myths for me are very important because they are ways of understanding the world.
I think that many cultures have, through observation, reached certain conclusions and then that knowledge is passed from one generation to the next as a story.
They also have a root in reality, in science, in another way of understanding the surroundings, the outside, the environment.
A lot of the ideas and myths and stories that I use come from Venezuela, from my own background.
Also growing up as a daughter of artists surrounded by this super biodiverse environment that really informs still the work that I do.
For example, with the acacia, this tree also called flamboyan, that originally comes from Madagascar.
So then it has also the story of migration.
It has the seeds inside, so it's also in a way a vessel where the seeds can inhabit and travel, but then this texture get imprinted directly onto the clay work.
And the idea is that each one of these statues, seres vegetales, vegetal beings, have almost like the spirit of each plant.
This is a replica of the Venus de Tacarigua, a specific region near a lagoon in Venezuela.
And I was very drawn to this image because of the eyes.
They have this shape of an oval that's always recurrent in my work, but it's related to the seed, the vulva, the eyes, the mouth.
This kind of digging into the past, it would bring me ideas of how to rework the clay or find ways to connect the past and the present.
[Music]
In Venezuela, the labour songs have been there for a long time and the process of preparing the corn was a long one.
So there was these moments of intimacy where these two women were sharing time, like applying the force into this meal to create the corn.
The recordings are from their own stories, their lovers, their families.
So they in a way improvised and then they composed these songs that passed from different generations.
It is important to me as well this image, because it was taken in Margarita Island where my family lived for a long time.
It was a place that I visited and I lived for many years.
And in that island there is also a community of potters where I have been working with them as well called El Cercado.
El Cercado had been there with all these women potters, these abuelas, the grandmothers, who were taking the rock from the mountain and making their own clay and then using a fire pit to finish.
And now the new generation of potter is made of young men who have learned from their grandmother, also the aunts.
It's a community effort.
The cocoon for me has been important in a way because it makes me think of a womb, of a space where you are protected and contained.
That's why the first time I used the cocoon was actually in a ceramic vase from El Cercado community, and my body was emerging out of this vase.
It's almost like thinking of the process of how the worm can become a butterfly and how this amazing, extraordinary transformation can happen. Like your body would go in a toilet, melt, and you would go out as an elephant, something completely different.
These are my collodion wet plates that I did back in 2013.
It was almost like a Polaroid of the times where you put the emulsion on the aluminum plate and then the whole process has to happen in 10 minutes.
And at the end you have, instead of having a negative on film, you have a positive on aluminum.
So this is what goes into the camera and comes directly out of the camera with the image on it.
It is almost like a still life where I would carefully choose the plants, like the pad, the fern, this is a fungi.
And then the fabric will become like a place for worship, it's both pagan and sacred at the same time.
The fabrics were sources from Brixton market.
I have been living in the area for more than 15 years.
Of course they are well known as African fabrics.
And in my personal story, it's a bit of a journey that some of my ancestors came from Trinidad to Venezuela, and then I did Caracas to Brixton, which is the heart of all of these West Indies and different communities that nowadays also include Latin American people that have been coming to the area.
So I think the work is the capsule of all these multicultural place where we share many things.
Nothing in nature can work solely.
It has to be part of the system.
