Paula Flores

Through the years in my work I have explored mine and others relationships with nature. As someone that was born and raised in an industrial city, the border city of Tijuana, my ties with nature were controlled within the city landscape, the other ties were from unknown lands and times that I relived through my grandparents stories of when they were young and the countless adventures at my grandparents garden and ranch or other places in the area of Tecate where we would go for walks and hikes that allowed me to see other dimensions. My relationship with nature always felt magical. I always envisioned these moments that they described so carefully when they were reliving their childhood memories. Their vocabulary was filled with references of nature and all the beings that inhabit within.

Myself being from a city didn’t fully understand all of these poetic ways of nature that overflow into language, culture and behaviour that allow oneself to find its place in the world. Now that years have passed since I have heard those stories. I can still see some of those images in my mind. Now through my work I find myself exploring these connections that for many of us have not been part of our life because we grew up with concepts versus actual experiences of what nature is. How can I, we people from the cities, reconnect with nature? How can we make ourselves feel part of it again and not something that is next to us close or far away? Through my art work I investigate the hierarchies that humans have created within the natural world, the concepts that we have created to dissect and categorize to our benefit all entities that make up not just our physical world, but the whole cosmos. Trying to dive deep into developing our abilities of communication and the establishment of meaningful reciprocal relationships with other beings, other entities.

Through the practice of painting, sculpture, installation and performance and using a diversity of material from organic to inorganic and from “living to non living”. I question the limits that we have imposed on ourselves with the concepts that we have created and look for flexible ways to create new understandings and new ways of existing. Using rocks,branches, plants, bacteria, fungi as guides, storytellers of the history of the world and the symbiotic relationships that had to be established and kept in balance for the existence of what we know as nature I explore our understandings of who we are as humans out and inside of the natural world by applying the role of the mediator and inverting it in all ways possible to me. Pushing myself to leave the concepts and comfort of what it is to be either,or.