The ability to reach a rich vein of of the unconscious and to translate it effectively into philosophy, literature, music or scientific discovery is one of the hallmarks of what is commonly called genius.” — Carl Gustav Jung, Man and His Symbols.

 Ian Alden Russell exposed in his paper “art and Archaeology, a Modern Allegory” the deep engagements between archaeology and contemporary art, and visual and material gesture and culture.

I began my art practice in the seventies of the past Century, sharing with archaeology the sensibility for digging into the unknown, approaching history as subject and historical memory as a proposal for exploration, including the viewer in the resolution of the material language of her paintings.

I share my art practice with the same discipline of objectives of archaeological excavation, documentation, survey, recording, reconstruction and representation.

The assertion of the maintenance of the depth metaphor as allegory in no way precludes the critical development of other modes of discourse, rather, it requires that ongoing critical discourse be continued and enhanced, establishing new proposals that expose modernity’s ontological foundation in the notion of ‘progress’.

The symbols I picks to represent this notion start with the monumental colonial stone walls and evolve to the ephemeral objects of our consumer era that populate the urban contemporary landfills: crushed aluminum cans and plastic bottles that frame the images of ancient renewed symbols.  The morphological composition in my paintings is involuntarily related to pre-Hispanic cosmogonies. This happens intuitively as the mythic aboriginal tradition considers artists are shamans, who share perilously the gifts of journeying into the Realm of the Gods or the collective unconscious, and then back again.

“An artist’s ‘hidden memory’ functions optimally, even though he usually does not realize it”, commented Carl Gustav Jung. Consequently, that memory is not an individual one, but its images come directly from the collective unconscious and the artist´s childhood memories. In my case, my father’s passion for collecting pre-Hispanic Nicaraguan ceramics was the trigger that led my to love aboriginal pots and vessels even I do not recalls that circumstance as a motivation.

My  proposal adds to the buried memories of our pre-Hispanic cultures and the colonial walls that raised over them, the new walls of popular culture, symbols of the ephemeral and the disposable, in which the ads, shows and public figures are imposed over our city walls as well as upon our historical memory. Therefore  this makes me think, (in the same way that I hope you will meditate on this matter), on how the pre-Hispanic pottery was a product of the earth and every vessel, pot, jar or censer, was not only an object of daily use, but also a sacred object with which both rulers and priests were buried, as well as the people of the villages, because ceramic pots were the container of life, cocoa, corn, chicha, and so many other foods now forgotten but that have been rising from the denied cultures, consistently erased from the face of this planet by the Western Culture.

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