Cave Woman

Cave Woman is a self-portrait that treats painting as a method of return. Unable to travel home, I practice “home” through time: I place myself inside Serra da Capivara, one of Brazil’s most ancient sites of rock imagery, and render my body with a near-bidimensional posture that echoes cave marks. My dog, who also migrated with me, stands as companion and witness, a portable form of shelter. Water figures, fish and crab, appear as memory-creatures: interior, tidal, persistent. The work imagines softness not as comfort, but as endurance, the way belonging is carried through gesture, repetition, and care when stability is conditional. Home becomes something enacted: an ancestral space I cannot physically reach, but can inhabit through mark-making.

Cave Woman will be exhibited in Soft Structures, a group show at The Makers’ Ensemble, on view March 10–April 10. Opening reception: March 17, 6–8 PM at 281 N 7th St, Brooklyn, NY 11211. Medium: oil on canvas.