Artist Statement
Kefta seasoned with Goya, Umm Kulthum playing in the background as my mom speaks Spanish on the phone, colorful tatreez pillows on white couches, calling my uncles “amo” and my aunts “titi,” my grandma on her prayer mat while my grandmi shouts “ay Dios mio!” I couldn’t necessarily identify which components belonged to which culture.
My work is a glimpse into an intangible world that I have always known. Many of us who are mixed carry this world with us; each of ours is different, but they all run parallel to one another. Growing up as a Puerto Rican-Palestinian-Midwesterner has always left me living in this world, at the intersection of three cultures. This world is complex, it lives on the edge of celebration and loss, reality and imagination, past and present, comfort and anxiety. In my practice, I create and piece together ceramic multiples, fragments, and tiles with collaged surfaces that imitate and hold onto traditions, icons, architecture, and language from my family’s oral histories, to keep them alive.
My practice highlights and questions how we hold onto traditions and stories and how we create our own, new iterations through time, as cultures naturally shift and change in diaspora. These cultures are carried on through repetition, daily gestures, and acts of care, which is reflected in my practice through repetitive, tedious acts and careful craft. My work questions what is lost and what is gained in the mixing of cultures. Parts of it fragment and fade through time, memory, and diaspora, but the parts that are left have adapted and been enriched by other fragments that never seemed like they would fit. These seemingly mismatched parts come together unexpectedly to form a new, unconventional whole that cannot simply be broken down into its initial parts.