photo by Saahera Ashraf
For any additional information or commissions please contact me via email or find me on social media
Bio:
Verónica Pedrosa Abdala is an artist, storyteller, and curator. She enjoys sharing her work with youth as a way to encourage building vibrant communities. Her approach is practical; she teaches others how to create using the resources available to them. Her work empowers individuals to create healthy connections between the environment and themselves. She expresses that there is a beauty of being in a specific place and building connections to it, to the people – it makes this ordinary place you can locate on a map, a special space where one has feelings attached to it. She engages in this work in the U.S. and in her home country Colombia.
For artist(a) Pedrosa Abdala, art helps express emotional truths that might otherwise remain invisible. She has a special interest in experiences with Dislocation, Displacement, and Dualities. She tells stories from the inside out - stories of Colombia by a Colombian. The overall composition of each piece expresses the artist’s understanding that humans cannot be categorized in a single story. She hopes this will open a window or door that is available to all of us.
Veronica Pedrosa Abdala received a M.A.T. (Master of Art in Teaching) and a B.F.A. (Bachelor in Fine Arts) in Illustration with a minor in Fibers from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.
Artist Statement:
Dualities, displacements, dislocations, distance, differences, assimilation, betweens, identity, culture, language, material, emotion, sacred, personal, unrelatable, materiality, reality, meaning, emotion, unknown.
I have a special interest in experiences with dualities, displacements, and dislocations. My art facilitates questions and the constant fall into the unknown. Through introspective inquiries, my work transformed from the vague, unknown into the exploration of personal relationships to family, tradition, and objects.
My practice involves a process of learning through making, mending and disrupting, creating repetitive gestures. By inquiring on my memories with materiality, I am deciphering things known to me, thinking about how memories live in this state of permanence versus impermanence alongside my culture, identity, language, and material. These repetitive gestures also break apart what feminine power is as I connect the textiles to womanhood and the pattern of learning and unlearning to femininity and womanhood. This intimate first interest becomes profoundly plural since it intermingles experiences.
My work makes you look hard and come with reasoning on how these materials interact together. The work becomes art existing in transitional spaces, as moving pieces where the viewer can notice the varying surface weight and the surface texture and layers. I experiment with the placement of my work - where does it live? In the natural or human-made environments? I am interested in creating unnatural fragmented spaces where one is approached with confusion and can tease it out by pausing and observing and rethinking: what is part of the space and what doesn’t belong. I manipulate materials to co-construct meaning and build installations and pieces that contrast light and heavy, industrial and handmade, hard and soft.
