Join artist and educator Lindaluz Carrillo for a hands-on workshop exploring banana leaf weaving! Drawing from her Peruvian heritage and family’s professional boxing legacy, Carrillo will share how banana leaves became an important material in her practice.  Participants will learn basic weaving techniques and create their own sculptural weavings using banana leaves, while exploring how materials can carry stories of family, identity, and cultural tradition. 

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

In my practice I am exploring the power of resilience by reimagining the body as a space of  resistance. I am interested in examining how the body heals, endures, and restores itself while overcoming adversities. I process these ideas in my work by repurposing, altering and assembling objects such as heavy-weight bags, boxing gloves, found objects, and raw materials. My methods include wrapping, weaving, braiding and assembling materials like banana leaves, eucalyptus, rope, canvas and soil onto the surfaces. 

My work is rooted in honoring my family’s boxing legacy and Peruvian heritage and legacies we encounter within each other's lives. Each layer, gesture, and line created in the work holds a message, memory, and story that ties back to courage, pride, and resilience. My practice deepens my understanding of what it means to explore ancestral knowledge, transformative healing, and restoration of the body and the spirit. I transform surfaces into protective shields that can become instruments of healing. My grandfather was an international Peruvian boxer between the 1930s and 50s. My father won his first Golden Gloves at the age of 15. Their professional boxing legacy plays a huge role in the creation of my work. Their experiences, newsletters, and photographs from their fights are collaged and embedded into a lot of my most recent work.  –Lindaluz Carillo