Becoming
2024-Present
Becoming is a portrait series shaped by personal and familial stories. The portraits serve as the central works in this project, each one marking an emotion or moment worth commemorating through a ritual watercolor process. The other works carry the story forward, expanding the portrait into new forms and contexts.
Recurring motifs create a visual language that reflects themes of growth, connection, honor, and legacy. While the portraits anchor the work, the surrounding pieces build a wider narrative that speaks to honor and legacy.
Becoming is an ongoing project. Each portrait invites new ways of documenting and reimagining the stories that shape a life, telling the stories that continue unfold over time.
Florece .Blooms (2024) 12in x 16in Watercolor and gold leaf Cold Press Paper .... This split self-portrait embodies the unfolding nature of Becoming, where identity is both fragmented and whole. As both altar and archive, Florece preserves the act of growth as a ritual of transformation.
Recuerdo .Remember (2025) 12in x 16in Watercolor, gouache, color pencil, and gold leaf Cold Press Paper ... Through its use of cultural and symbolic language, this portrait bridges the personal and the ancestral. It stands as altar and archive, holding memory in a space where past and present meet. Within the Becoming series, Recuerda emphasizes remembrance as a cultural practice of preservation and storytelling.
Untitled Design (Design & Textile Study, 2025) ... This graphic design emerged as an extension of the portrait Recuerda, transforming its symbolic language into a larger geometric and textile-inspired form. As part of Becoming, the work demonstrates how each portrait can generate new methods and mediums, expanding beyond paint into design and future woven possibilities. It functions as both sketch and archive, preserving memory through abstraction while pointing toward what is still unfolding.
La Ancestra (2025) 18inx24in Watercolor, gold leaf and mixed media on cold press paper La Ancestra explores lineage in our growth and becoming. The braid functions as both spine and tree trunk, wrapped in a traditional styled Cinta. This Cinta tells a story of the cosmic connection between generations of women, both living and dead, merging the physical with the spiritual. This works honors a woman who has come before me, Zoila Emelia Orellana-Estrada, and how the threads of her being link to my own becoming. Te extraño cada día, abuela
Moments in Time (2025) Paper, Cold Stock, and Gold Leaf on Cold Press Paper Moments in Time is a collage created from family photographs taken in their home in Guatemala. The images show three generations together, from granddaughter to grandparents, in their shared everyday space. The photographs were scanned, reconstructed into a new composition, and assembled by hand with yellow cardstock framing the scene. Gold leaf is applied in the style of kintsugi, highlighting the beauty of tethering connection and the act of holding the memory of being together. As a companion to La Ancestra, this piece honors the homes that are provided and how they shape us, and how even fleeting moments deserve preservation. It brings separate moments into one image to preserve their shared legacy.