In my large-scale oil paintings, I use abstract map-making as a guide to create imaginary places and decipher through unknown spaces that explore my family, identity, and spirituality as a first-generation Chicana.  By working on large canvases and through my bodily relationship to scale, drawing, and movement, I discover unlocatable land-forms through an improvisational process of mapping internal boundaries. My forms and dotted lines reflect the feelings of my individual-specific longing to locate myself as a whole through external routes leaving and entering boundaryless forms.

Painting on raw manta, I trust the soak-staining and resistance of ink, oils, and oil paint. These stains develop into biomorphic shapes through various viscosities and intimate mark-makings. The colored oil stains are reflections of my intuition and conceptualized cultural resistance. Using mnemonics to locate my histories, I place myself as the small protagonist in a large world, signaling my intuition to guide me. The use of language suggests directions and entry points into these maps. The flowers and strawberry forms ground me when I wander between worlds that lead us across open or closed barriers of pink-earth color fields. The strawberries reflect my internal critique of becoming a fresa and my father's identity in Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. I use lines that resemble ornate Mexican wrought iron gates to suggest places of entrance into my spiritual forms. 

Moments of manta are left untouched, signaling that all areas of the map have not been discovered yet, questioning my intuition that has guided me to discover the painted locations. I wonder about decolonizing the idea of maps to create guides for myself and my future generations into places of belonging. Bringing forward my first-generation experience of not knowing where I am, while using my curiosity to find where I want to be, these paintings function as my spiritual guides.