Las Plantas Que Me Acompañan
Paloma Mayorga
on view July 13 - August, 2024
Paloma Mayorga is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, video, performance, and installation. Often using her own body as medium, Mayorga explores movement, place, and cultural identity in relation to landscape and ancestral uses of plants.
Defined by her bicultural upbringing, Mayorga grew up taking long road trips between Austin, Texas and Mexico City. She observed changes in the landscape and developed a sense of home through the plants that decorated the gardens of her grandmothers, as well as those that were utilized in local cuisine and home remedies.
Her art practice is rooted in exploring memories attached to plants, with a special focus on Latinx ecofeminist perspectives. Mayorga’s work is tactile yet ephemeral. She embraces transient materials, such as gelatin and fresh plant matter that grow and dry out over time, as a means to investigate the concept of botanical wisdom, or the practice of slowly unearthing bits of inherited knowledge that have been passed down generations of women as tools for healing and survival.
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Paloma Mayorga is a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist and independent curator born and based in Austin, Texas. She earned a BA in Painting from the Sarofim School of Fine Arts at Southwestern University, and has gone on to exhibit her work across Texas and nationally. Most recently, her work was exhibited at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, MI, Artpace in San Antonio, TX, The Contemporary Austin, and Big Medium in Austin, TX. Mayorga also received the Emerging Artist Award from the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, Best Visual Artist by the Austin Chronicle Reader’s Poll, and Southwestern University’s 18 Under 40 Award.
In 2022, Mayorga began an ongoing curatorial project titled Yo trabajo con la tierra / I work with the earth that brings ecofeminist perspectives to the forefront. The first iteration of this project was presented at Big Medium in Austin, TX. The work exhibited included performance, photography, video, installation, and sculpture, and evoked a collaborative relationship with nature prompting a sense of kinship to the earth, and consequently, a more empathetic understanding of ourselves and each other.
