Can you start by giving us an overview of your practice and what led you to explore the connections between materiality, memory, and the healing aspects of your cultural heritage?

My practice emerges from a deep engagement with the body as a living expression of nature—an understanding profoundly shaped by my Colombian heritage and an upbringing rooted in the land. I come from a lineage of people who lived in close relationship with the earth: farming, trading animals, crafting tools, and turning to plants to care for the body when formal medicine wasn’t available.

The smells of homemade concoctions, ointments, and teas linger vividly in my memory—plants steeped in dark glass jars, their intense, sometimes pungent odors and vibrant colors suspended in liquid. Flowers and herbs were used in baths for tired, aching bodies, their vapors inhaled to soothe and restore. Food and spices were not merely nourishment but medicine—remedies for fevers, stomach aches, and fatigue. These weren’t separate practices; they were daily life. Not theory, but knowledge passed through gestures, touch, and doing.

Being around illness—both in others and in myself—was also formative. Bodily sensations can be intense, overwhelming, even frightening. These early experiences taught me to stay close to the body’s truth, even when it’s difficult, and continue to inform how I hold space for others today.

Growing up this way, I developed a sensibility that sees the body not as connected to nature, but as nature itself: an animal among animals, a mammal shaped by soil, by health and its absence, by the cycles and unpredictability of the land. This way of seeing and feeling remains central to my work.

It informs the materials I choose and how memory and healing are allowed to emerge in my practice. I’m drawn to the idea that the body doesn’t just hold ancestral knowledge—it is ancestral knowledge. This lives in our cells, our tissues, our breath. And beyond what’s inherited genetically, our bodies are shaped by everything we’ve encountered: what we’ve touched, tasted, seen, heard; the people and environments we’ve grown up in. Each emotion, sensation, and perception can leave a trace. A single sensory impression can carry an entire world.

Touch, gesture, muscle memory, and the sensory presence of plants, soil, and animals form the language I explore in my work. These are not abstract concepts, but living, embodied traces that ground my practice in both personal and collective experience.

In exploring the intersections of materiality, memory, and healing, I continually return to the quiet, persistent practices of care embedded in my cultural heritage—subtle gestures and ways of being that, because they are quiet, often go unseen. My work creates space to honour and reimagine these embodied ways of knowing, especially in a world that so often separates the body from itself, from its natural wisdom, and healing from history.

Your statement mentions that you are deeply influenced by the idea that the human body keeps the memory of everything we have lived through our entire lives. How do you approach these phenomena in your practice?

I approach the idea that the body holds memory—not just metaphorically, but physically—through the materials I use and the gestures embedded in my making process. I often work with materials that are part of everyday life: humble, familiar things like remnants of textiles, threads, leaves, and organic matter—what we might call ordinary, disposable materials. These substances are ones most of us have encountered, even if only peripherally. Their familiarity carries a quiet intimacy, a subtle power to evoke memory through the senses.

I’m drawn to techniques like sewing, embroidery, crochet, and knitting—not just for their visual or symbolic qualities, but because they live in the body. Even if someone has never held a needle or thread, these gestures are present in our daily lives. We all wear clothes; we all encounter fabric shaped, stitched, and formed by human hands. For me, these practices are not decorative—they are somatic. Sewing is a form of touch, repetition, and rhythm. These gestures are lodged in my muscle memory, inherited through watching, doing, and being near others who practiced them. The movements involved—threading, piercing, looping, mending—are deeply embodied and quietly reflective of care, survival, and history.

My Colombian heritage weaves itself into this process in subtle but profound ways. It reveals itself in how I choose a material—by texture, weight, color, or how it feels in my hands. It’s present in how an image emerges on a surface, not necessarily planned, but sensed and responded to. It’s instinctual. A bodily knowing.

Each body carries its own specific imprints—ways of moving, patterns of attention, gestures of care or resistance. We are shaped both by what we’ve inherited genetically and by what we’ve lived through experientially. This uniqueness shows up in everything we do: how we speak, how we cook, how we walk—and in my case, how I make.

My work is a dialogue with those traces: sensory, emotional, and ancestral. By working with materials and methods that speak directly to the body, I invite those memories to surface—not as narratives, but as sensations, presences, and quiet recognitions.

Textiles and organic materials play a central role in your art. What draws you to these materials, and how do they align with your exploration of the human body as a "documentary holder" of memories?

Crochet, sewing, and knitting are embedded in my body—they live in my hands, in the movements my fingers remember. I learned them young, and over time they became a kind of language for me—just as natural as writing or drawing. Growing up, it was expected that a woman would know how to mend her own clothes: sew on a button, fix a torn seam, repair a sock. Clothes were meant to last. Replacing them wasn’t always an option, so mending was part of daily life.

We used to go to local dressmakers for our smarter clothes. It was more affordable than buying things in shops, and the quality was often better. I still remember the magic of those spaces: workshops full of fabrics, threads, rulers, pins. Watching a dress appear from what looked like nothing always felt like a quiet kind of wonder.

It’s meaningful to me now, living in the UK, to think back to how much my family admired Scottish and English wool fabrics. Back then, they were seen as the height of elegance. For my parents’ generation, clothes were important. They were among the first in our family who could actually choose how they dressed—use fashion to express themselves. That freedom, that pride left a mark on me.

So when I make something now, every stitch carries emotion, memory, and presence. These gestures—these materials—are threads of personal and family history woven into form. Through them, I give shape to what the body holds and remembers.

Textiles and organic materials feel like natural extensions of the body. They hold warmth, texture, and vulnerability. We wrap ourselves in fabric, sleep in it, bleed on it, cry into it. These materials are close to us in the most everyday, intimate ways—and because of that, they’re already soaked in memory.

I’m drawn to simple, familiar things—thread, cloth, natural fibres, hair, dried plants. Materials that might be overlooked. But they’ve been used for centuries across cultures to make clothes and textiles. They resonate on a sensory level. And that sensory pull can unlock memories or emotions—sometimes subtly, sometimes with surprising intensity. Working with them—touching them, stitching into them, feeling their textures—feels like being in conversation with the body and everything it’s lived through.

Textiles also have their own rhythm, their own kind of slowness. Sewing, embroidering, knotting—these are repetitive, meditative acts. They mirror how the body stores memory—not always in words, but in gestures, posture, muscle memory, and skin. In that way, the body is a documentary archive, layered with sensations, memories, and ancestry. It’s not a fixed story, but a living one—always being rewritten through touch, feeling, and care.

Through these materials and gestures, I explore the body not just as a subject, but as a keeper of knowledge—holding the unspoken, the felt, the remembered. My work tries to make space for those traces to surface, to be seen and honoured.

Knitting and crafting are deeply rooted in ancestral practices. How do you view the act of working with these materials as a conversation or collaboration with your lineage?

Knitting and crafting feel like deeply ancestral acts to me—like living conversations with those who came before. These practices hold a kind of wisdom that doesn’t rely on words: gestures passed from hand to hand, body to body, across generations. For thousands of years, textiles haven’t just protected our bodies—they’ve marked rituals, transitions, and identity. From birth to death, fabric has wrapped us, adorned us, and witnessed us. Even in today’s digitised world, we still turn to textiles for comfort, beauty, and expression.

Each stitch, knot, or weave is more than just a technique—it’s like an invocation. It brings into the present an ancient rhythm—one that’s often automated now, but still pulses with human memory. When I work with thread, cloth, or fibre, I feel like I’m continuing a dialogue that started long before me. These materials carry time in them. They’re tangible, sensory archives. They let me work with the invisible—with what the body remembers, even when the mind can’t put it into words.

In that sense, crafting becomes a way of listening. A way of honouring silent griefs, unspoken strengths, and the quiet resilience of those who shaped my life. It’s not about recreating history or illustrating heritage—it’s about making space for presence. So that the echoes of my ancestors, still held in breath, posture, and skin, can be acknowledged and felt.

Working with textiles is also a kind of return. A return to slowness, to intimacy, to the textures of care. And in that return, I feel a deep, wordless kinship with my lineage—a collaboration that’s more about feeling than form.

Your conceptual research and the medium you employ in your practice are profoundly intertwined. Could you elaborate on how your work engages with the "embedded DNA" of craft techniques, and how this shapes the physicality or materiality of your art?

The craft techniques I work with—sewing, crocheting, knitting, embroidery—are embodied forms of knowledge. They carry what you’ve beautifully called “embedded DNA”: a deep imprint of history, memory, and presence. These gestures have lived in many bodies, passed down through repetition. When I use them, I feel like I’m stepping into a current that’s been flowing for generations—adding one more stitch to a fabric humanity’s been weaving for thousands of years. Just a simple chain stitch in a vast, collective cloth.

These gestures aren’t mine—I didn’t invent them, and they don’t belong to me. And yet, like words in a shared language, they can be arranged in ways that can express something completely new.

What draws me in is the slowness, the intimacy, the repetition. These techniques require touch, patience, and attention. They’re made up of small, careful acts—stitches that might seem insignificant on their own, but build into something over time. That slow accumulation feels a lot like how memory works in the body: layered, subtle, not always visible, but deeply felt. I think of it as a kind of choreography of care, where every gesture matters.

The “embedded DNA” of these crafts doesn’t just connect me to my own past—it links me to a much broader, often invisible lineage. Hands that made, mended, held things together. It’s amazing to think that something as humble as thread or cloth carries generations of survival, problem-solving, care, and creativity. When I work with them, it feels like I’m in conversation with time itself.

That deeply shapes the physicality of my work. I choose materials that are close to the body—soft, tactile, often fragile—because I’m interested in what they can evoke emotionally and sensorially. They speak quietly, but they carry weight. There’s a vulnerability in them that feels honest.

So for me, the conceptual side of the work—thinking about the body as an archive, about trauma, healing, and inherited memory—isn’t separate from the materials or the making. The craft isn’t illustrating the idea—it is the idea. Made real through time, care, and repetition.

Please tell us more about the submitted works titled "Growing". What is the conceptual foundation behind these intricate sculptural pieces?

"Growing" is a series of sculptural pieces made from sunflower and pumpkin seeds, arranged in intricate, radiating patterns. The conceptual foundation began with my fascination with insect nests—especially those made by wasps and bees. I’ve always been drawn to the tension they hold: the low, constant hum of their collective labour, the threat of their sting, the fragility of their small bodies, and the quiet brilliance of their communal architecture.

There’s something about a wasp’s nest that feels both mesmerizing and unsettling. It can look aggressive—almost weapon-like—but it’s built by such delicate, vulnerable creatures working together. I wanted the pieces to carry that same kind of tension: visually sharp and intense, but made from gentle, harmless materials. Seeds are nourishing, edible, life-giving—completely at odds with the defensive, stinging presence we often associate with nests.

The silence of these works is also important. Unlike a buzzing hive, these forms don’t make a sound, yet their patterns suggest movement, growth, even vibration. There’s a quiet energy in their stillness—like something slowly unfolding, or just about to.

At the heart of the series is the kind of duality I find endlessly compelling—life and death, sweetness and threat, beauty and discomfort. Opposites are always intertwined. The grey area between meanings is where I find the most life.

These sculptural forms are an invitation to sit with that space in-between—to hold the contradictions, the tenderness and the tension. Nature, the body, everything holds both. And in that layered, quiet complexity, something deeply alive is always growing.

As someone with a strong background in both digital media and traditional crafts, how do you see the role of tactile, handmade art in today’s increasingly digital and industrialized world?

For me, digital media has never felt separate from the body—it has expanded, and continues to expand, how we sense, perceive, and interact with the world. Digital tools heighten sensory experience, offering new ways to see, touch, hear, and feel. They’ve opened up new doors of perception. I’m deeply interested in how digital environments and technologies can amplify the textures of human experience.

That said, in a world increasingly mediated by screens and automation, I see tactile, handmade art not as a return to the past, but as part of a shift—maybe similar to what happened with painting after photography was invented. When painting was no longer responsible for representing the visible world, it was freed to explore form, emotion, abstraction, and imagination. It led to entirely new ways of making and understanding art.

I think we’re in a similar moment with craft. As digital culture becomes more ubiquitous, the handmade takes on a different kind of power—not because it’s “better” or “more real,” but because it offers a slower, more embodied, more intimate way of knowing.

For me, the handmade and the digital aren’t in conflict. They’re two currents in the same river—each with its own speed, shape, and temperature. My practice moves between them, grounded in the belief that both can deepen our connection to the body, to memory, and to what it means to be human today.

In the context of your artistic practice, how do you engage with the evolving relationship between human-made materials and the natural world, and in what ways do you challenge traditional notions of materiality to foster sustainable practices that minimize environmental impact?

I grew up in a culture where things were made to last. Every object, every material, every bit of food was used fully and completely. Waste wasn’t an option—resources were deeply appreciated, not just because they were expensive, but because they were understood as precious. The strong ties to the land where I grew up carried this same understanding: that resources aren’t infinite, that they must be respected, and that we’re part of an integrated, interdependent chain.

This early imprint still shapes my work. I’m drawn to materials that are often overlooked or discarded—things considered no longer "useful," things that have already served their function and are now seen as waste. I work with what might seem precarious, fragile, and negligible—because I’m interested in the value we assign to materials, and in what we choose to throw away once we’ve taken what we needed.

I once saw a Picasso exhibition that included drawings on napkins and scraps of paper—the only materials he could find during the war, when paper was scarce and precious. His comment stayed with me: how even a simple piece of paper could hold immense value when resources were truly limited. It made me think about how much—and how easily—we waste today: paper, plastic, glass, materials shaped by complex processes and histories, yet so often taken for granted.

In my practice, I try to engage with these tensions. I challenge conventional ideas of materiality by choosing what’s been dismissed or overlooked—working with natural, organic, and often ephemeral materials in ways that invite slowness and suggest new ways of seeing. My work isn’t just about sustainability as a strategy—it’s about shifting perception. About what we notice—and the beliefs that determine what we value.

Art and artists play various roles in the fabric of contemporary society. How do you see artistic practices advancing sustainability and social consciousness?

I’ve always been drawn to the idea in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray that “all art is quite useless.” Not in the sense that it has no value, but in the sense that its purpose is not to instruct, persuade, or produce a specific outcome. Of course, art has long been used to carry messages, challenge systems, and shape culture—but it also has the extraordinary ability to escape those purposes. To remain elusive. To exist in a space that isn’t fully graspable by logic or utility.

This is where I see its power in relation to sustainability and social consciousness. Art can bypass the intellect and speak directly to the senses, to the body. It can draw attention not through argument, but through flesh knowledge. It doesn’t always offer answers—instead, it creates space to slow down, to interrupt the everyday, to make it possible to look again. That, in itself, is a radical gesture in a world so fixated on speed, production, and clarity. We live in a time that distrusts mystery. And yet, mystery is where life begins.

When I think about sustainability and social consciousness, I think not only about materials or systems, but about perception. What do we notice? What do we overlook? What do we call “waste”? I work with fragile, discarded, and natural materials because they speak to what we tend to disregard once it no longer serves a function. They allow me to invite attention—to create space for reconsidering value.

Artists can offer new languages to speak about these things—not didactic, but poetic. Not by explaining, but by revealing. Not instructional, but experiential. They can provide other ways of seeing, other experiences of interconnectedness, fragility, and resilience. That’s what art can offer: a space to pause, to remember, to question, to feel, to reimagine. And from that space, change can begin—not imposed, but grown.

What message or call to action would you like to share with our readers?

I hope people connect with the quiet, often overlooked things—the ones we usually dismiss or brush aside. There is so much meaning and beauty in what goes unseen or unvalued. I’m drawn to how we respond to materials viscerally, before thought steps in—how something as simple as a single hair can be beautiful or repulsive depending on its context. These subtle shifts in perception reveal so much about how we relate to the world and to ourselves.

My invitation is to pause and notice. To feel before understanding. To let yourself be affected by the texture, the fragility, the intimacy of things. We live in a world that moves quickly, that favors clarity and certainty. But there is another kind of knowing—one that lives in the body, in sensation, in the ambiguous and the unresolved. 

I hope my work creates space for that kind of encounter and gently encourages a re-sensitization to ourselves, our bodies’ own wisdom, and the world around us.

Find more about the artist here.

Cover image:

Growing by Claudia Torres.

Portrait image:

Creatures by Claudia Torres.

Images courtesy of Claudia Torres.