At the beginning of her career, she developed her work around the deterioration and demolition of horizontal properties built between the 1960s and 1980s in certain neighborhoods of Bogotá, carrying out various projects in buildings that were in a state of abandonment. As a result of the research group “Practices of the Void,” conducted at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, she began analyzing a building that the university had acquired to expand its campus. The building showed significant damage caused by the climate and prolonged neglect.
In that space, she undertook an extensive creative process through which she experimented with hard architectural materials and softer ones such as caramel. This led to the creation of sculptural and installation pieces that spoke to the processes of material transformation in architecture, highlighting the ephemeral nature of construction and the contradictions inherent in Bogotá’s urban renewal.
In 2016, her artistic practice underwent a transformation as she began creating pieces using reclaimed wood and paint, making visible the ruins of architectural constructions that once formed part of Bogotá. Painting became a system of thought that allowed her to see and understand its local uses, giving rise to installation projects that drew from the palettes of interior and exterior architectural painting. These installations explored painting and the origin of materials with the aim of reversing their natural course—namely, their potential disappearance.
These projects were conceived as modular and unified through a line traced on the pieces by subtracting layers of paint applied to the wood. Those lines metaphorically referred to time and, more specifically, to the dating of materials as indicated by the quantity and/or simulation of paint layers. The resulting works reflected on the temporality of architecture and the materials that constitute it.
In the most recent stage of her practice, she approaches the exercise of painting and rethinks color in representation. She is currently exploring expanded painting and the potential of color in sculpture, using bodies of water—such as the sea at Isla Fuerte or the Bogotá River at the Tequendama Falls—as starting points. This process has involved various lines of research that have resulted in a range of written texts. These are complex projects that reflect on the place of painting today, grounded in specific geographic and historical contexts. All of this has been made possible thanks to her research on expanded Colombian painting, which she developed in her master’s thesis in Art History at the Universidad de los Andes.