Maria Clara Rios Cacua
when home won't let you stay, siempre te cargó conmigo
Media: wood, acrylic, pigments, pigment sticks, embroidery, collage, organza, textiles, acrylic inks, oil, oil pastels, canvas, cotton, woodcut, memory
My project, when home won't let you stay, siempre te cargó conmigo, is a four-wall immersive installation structure that delves into the question: What is home? For immigrants, home is a feeling of belonging. We move across continents, cities, boroughs, pursuing that feeling of belonging. What is it to make a home? To be a home? To search for home? This work explores the ephemerality of home through the eyes of an immigrant. I consider how home can be both physical and transitory, metaphorical and embodied. Through this work I examine the complexities of my own history of immigration in combination with colonial histories, memories, intergenerational trauma, and, most of all, the idea of belonging. The roots of this structure lie in the Bogotá and Quito landscape; it contains traces of my homes growing up, wood carvings of my family's faces, embroidery charting the life cycle of native flora and crops and incorporating aspects of Indigenous knowledge, and abstract depictions of plants. I weave these threads together through printmaking, painting, and layering, to create a body of work that represents a journey of processing and accessing memory as I strive to capture the experience of making and being home.
Thank you for joining me on this journey.
For more information, visit mariaclara.studio.
