Elleven Vargas

Guadalupe Vargas, 2022

Paper Bags, Acrylic paint, Wire, Thread, Graphite
3’x7.5’

Untitled (I’ve been here before), 2021

Discarded cereal box, graphite
20” x 13”

Untitled (Planes and Portal), 2021 (Installation view)

Discarded fabric, Natural pigments (pomegranate and beets), Acrylic Paint, Ink, Cotton string
Dimensions variable

“There’s spirits everywhere”, 2021

Discarded cereal box, india ink
7”x10”

Ranas, 2022

Sculpture installation with sound
Found wood, discarded cardboard, apoxie clay, acrylic paint, mirrored glass, sound
2’x2’x10”

Artist Statement

How can we heal our interpersonal, social and environmental relations? 

I engage this question through exploring consciousness of interconnectivity between human, non-human, more-than human beings on shared land. 

In the face of environmental crisis and societal division, learning care is a driving force in my work. Through enacting care, I mend these relations through material transformation. 

I engage with healing intimately- starting with the personal so that I can repair relations to my community and environments. 

These explorations reckon with my body, questions of spirituality, childhood wounds, generational traumas and rediscovering disconnections to land. I work with drag transformation, family archives, fantastical illustration and sculpture using discarded material.

I intend to craft an environment where these works are in dialogue with each other. Through this meditative space, I request collective presence, self-relationality and openness. 

I look towards transformative justice work, queer club spaces, guerilla gardens, decolonial practices, mutual aid organisation, sites of protest, and concerts. I seek to extend these moments of collective presence.

Through my admiration of nature, with all its fractility and metaphysical mystery, I believe exploring the personal opens portals to something past individualism, towards a collective being.