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Chumbes are belts of the Guambiano an indigenous community in Colombia. This a region now plagued by guerrilla and paramilitary conflict. These traditions are oppressed and suppressed by a new form of colonialism. I created a loom like grid piece and wove each mark through. I did so to translate the illusion of textile but also to keep a formal and poetic cohesion with the way I paint fauna and lace in other works. In turn this is also coherent and owes to how nature was recorded in the painting tradition of Spanish and English colonial illustrations of nature.

The bird in the image is copied from an Audubon print, the image of disaster from the news, and the landscape is inspired by North American colonial lace researched during a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution. El Damnificado is a survivor of a disaster.

The wood is driftwood from the Platte River and the bird is a shopped ready made by an anonymous artisan in Nebraska representing possibly a Nebraska bird.

Inspired in the archeological vitrines of the National Museum where my mother had her office in Bogotá and where I spent many hours strolling the long corridors full of Pre-Columbian artifacts absorbing the history of Colombia in an intimate way; this piece expresses the synchretic cultural memory of the Columbus exchange. It evokes the small vessels and technique used by the indians to melt gold. The activity and form was later was taken on by the Afro-Colombian communities until today.

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