erika ewel

statement

My artistic practice has evolved over more than thirty years at the intersection of body, memory, territory, and time. I work with drawing, painting, and textiles, understanding the latter as a conceptual language capable of activating critical readings of the intimate and the political.

Since my early works, my oeuvre has reflected on femininity and the historical construction of its representations. Drawing from organic vaginal forms, internal cartographies, and landscape references, I develop a visual archive that questions feminine stereotypes and inherited narratives. The use of ornament in my production is a constant reference to the imagery I grew up with: the stone facades of Andean Baroque churches, the textile patterns in the popular dress of the “cholitas,” and the repetition found in Andean weavings.

My research has focused on the relationship between body and territory. I conceive of the body as a landscape and the territory as a vulnerable body. The pollution of rivers and the devastation of the Amazon by illegal mining form part of the context I inhabit; I transmit this reality through a series of works using dyed, oxidized, and worn textiles.

In 2023, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I reconstructed my body from its pieces, and my artistic practice followed suit: I work with scraps of recycled and found materials, building my work from a consciousness of time and the fragility of the body.

Currently, I construct landscapes from recycled tapestry scraps, evoking childhood travels. I seek to convey the gaze of the girl who, in the 1980s, traveled with her family, observing the eternal Altiplano from the car window: the intensely blue sky, the quinoa and barley fields, the endless horizon, and light as the protagonist.

Each textile fragment is an emotional geography, a map made of memory and touch; a dialogue between body and territory, between the vast outdoors and the refuge of the domestic.