For Teopa with Love, 2023

 Video Link. (From Teopa with Love, performance)

Video Link.  (general exhibit and Teopa sculptures)

Driftwood sculptural artwork created specifically during Careyes Foundaiton artist residency in Careyes (Zapata), Mexico. Presented at solo exhibit EL Milagro de tus Ojos at Careyes Art Gallery.

This work feels like a quiet conversation between nature and human imagination. The driftwood — shaped first by tides, storms, salt, erosion, and time — carries its own memory long before it enters the gallery. By gathering and reassembling these fragments into a continuous form, you are not imposing control over nature, but collaborating with it. The piece becomes a bridge between the organic and the constructed, between what the world creates on its own and what human creativity chooses to continue.

There is also something deeply connected to childhood within it. The work recalls the instinctive way children build with whatever they find: sticks, shells, rocks, driftwood on the shore. Before art becomes theory or profession, creativity begins as play — as the simple desire to gather, arrange, imagine, and transform. The sculpture preserves that innocence. It feels almost like a memory physically unfolding through space.

The circular movement at the base suggests continuity and return, while the vertical rise evokes growth, evolution, and aspiration. It never feels fixed or closed. Instead, it suggests that everything is in transition — matter, memory, identity, even time itself. The wood once belonged to living trees, then to the ocean, then to the shore, and now to this sculptural gesture. Nothing disappears; it only changes form.

What is especially powerful is the tension between fragility and persistence. Each individual piece of driftwood appears weathered, temporary, vulnerable, yet together they create a structure that feels almost eternal — like a spine, a vortex, a passageway, or a timeline rising from the earth. The shadows extend the work further, almost suggesting invisible memories continuing beyond the physical object.

The piece ultimately becomes a meditation on continuity:
that nature continues through us,
that memory continues through objects,
that childhood continues inside adulthood,
and that creativity itself is simply another current in the endless movement of transformation.

Or perhaps simply:

“Nothing truly ends.
The ocean reshapes it, memory carries it, and the human spirit gives it another form.”

Link to Exhibit essay by Tere Iturralde.