My work emerges from my experience growing up with migration and the instability of home, thinking through what is lost and what can still be recovered. To navigate financial challenges, my parents renovated homes, a practice I now carry into my paintings. Clearing dry grass, laying tile spacers, and painting walls were part of my childhood. Because each space was temporary, decoration became a form of care tied to our willingness to stay. The more we altered a home, the more difficult it became to leave.

In my paintings, I construct environments that exist somewhere between recollection and invention. I am drawn to places that feel familiar without belonging to a memory I can locate. Some recall landscapes I grew up around, while others feel like somewhere I have been without knowing when. I think about whether I have traveled to them in a dream, and how a place can feel remembered without having been lived in.

Influenced by Fotoescultura, a traditional Mexican art form that combines photography and sculpture to memorialize loved ones, I approach image-making as a way of preserving something that cannot remain unchanged. I collect images and translate them into paintings, but with time, these representations begin to feel insufficient. I return to them as blueprints. My process sometimes involves transferring a previous painting onto a new canvas with heat-transfer vinyl and painting around its imprint. Each time I return to an image, I am rebuilding something I have already tried to preserve.

Architecture has become more present in my recent paintings. Gates, walls, fences, and other structures fade in and out of the landscape, while the weeds and foliage surrounding them feel more certain. I grew up watching houses change and eventually leaving them behind, but dry grass and wild plants are something I remember from almost every place. In my paintings, these structures can disappear, become transparent, or lead somewhere I cannot fully see, while the landscape continues to grow around them.