& creative direction
fashion - interiors
COLOMBIA - UK
Multidisciplinary Colombian designer: visual communication and research-led material development for textiles. I work on the frontier between space and body, looking for those materials that have the potential to navigate both worlds expanding the possibilities of each application and technique.
My motivation comes from exploring tradition beyond established practices in design through making. Highlighting the material’s ability to create narratives and connections where the function and emotion are equally important, focusing on unusual materials, natural fibres and botanical dyes for textiles. I believe in the strength of emotions to create change and the connection between the body and their territory to maintain the commitment we have with them, which makes us accountable, members of nature.
_Emotions are functional. They create change
_I inherited the luxury of care, which I now apply as a method for design. This allows me to think about the wellbeing of people, communities and territories. Not as consumers and resources but as sentient beings. Crafting with time and intention, cherishing every form of wisdom and having the courage to respect tradition while embracing the unconventional.
_Traditional materials and techniques have the strength of many years behind them, many iterations later they have evolved to be the best that they could be. Knowing that there are not yet where they could, and as I have only this lifetime to make a difference, I see the potential and decide to build on top of them to inspire experimentation and courage to find caring methods and behaviours.
_I’m the colonised and the coloniser. I have to embrace my contradictions to create, I carry them with me, not as pride but as presence. It’s in the techniques I use, in the aesthetics I’ve been taught to admire, in the extractivists system I’m still trying to unlearn. The truth is, I wouldn’t be who I am without it, I wouldn’t exist outside of that collision. But I also know that my heritage wasn’t born with conquest, it survived and grew with it. That’s where I establish my practice now: in the act of holding both histories in the same body identity/creation/ body.
_The body is an ever-evolving archive. They store all kinds of knowledge, all forms of wisdom and contradictions. Ruled by everyday actions and constant repetition, they also let things go with care. Their memory is flawed, but it is not ruled by judgment, and it encourages mistakes in order to learn from them.