Photo by Ramie Ahmed
Artist Statement
I am a visual artist and poet, whose practice spans sculpture, painting, and performance. My work draws from Peruvian and Caribbean symbolism, as well as autobiographical fragments, to explore gender, race and sexual politics. I am most known for my highly detailed glass beaded relief sculptures, which are collaged with concrete and glass dust to create multilayered images in bas-relief that chronicle transformation and power relations of the human and collective body. I create mythologies that relate physically to the human body yet abstract it and politicize the space between allegory and reflection.
I use my body as the first point of reference to create new mythologies that center Black and brown people in queer and marginalized communities, as well as those living and working in the street. I consider my artworks as portals into an alternate space that is unbound from the oppressive project of history, as well as Western ideas of human, science, and nature. Inside these portals, space-time and history are malleable and unfixed.
My beaded relief paintings are inspired by political feminist craft traditions like arpilleras, which became popular under dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, and Haitian drapo vodou, yet aim to create a visual language of their own, using abstracted body gestures and motifs, and converging multiple perspectives, text, and images into one frame. This technique borrows from Caribbean literary theory and the work of Wilson Harris and Derek Walcott, who respectively founded quantum fiction and understood diasporic consciousness as something fragmented as a shattered vase, pieced whole through storytelling. Nonlinear and quantum visions explore how race, gender, and sexual politics effect the human body, and how new cosmologies can be imagined that propose alternatives futures, while eschewing frameworks of representational politics.
Selected Press:
Nereida Patricia’s New Mythologies
Witches Brew: A Review of Boil, Toil + Trouble
Inside Chicago’s Booming Arts Scene
A Thousand Beads Create a Picture: Introducing Textile Artist Nereida Patricia
Breakout Artists 2021: Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers
Black Narcissus: After Nereida Patricia’s cracked sidewalk fountain