Lenise Perez-Miller

Artist Statement

When I hand-build with clay, work with resin, create assemblages, or bring different materials together, I often find myself returning to memories, lived experiences, and personal stories that have shaped who I am.
I want my pieces to feel familiar in some way, as if they carry a memory the viewer can recognize. Through form, surface, and material choices, I try to make work that offers hope, comfort, nostalgia, and compassion while still leaving room for discovery and personal interpretation.
Narratives are at the center of my practice. I am drawn to the ways memory, identity, and landscape overlap, and I often explore those connections through human-animal hybrids, imagined environments, and layered materials. These forms allow me to hold onto a sense of play while also working through more personal and emotional ideas.
Many of my clay forms begin with whimsy. I enjoy creating figures that feel curious, strange, or gently humorous, but I also want them to invite a second look. Beneath their playful surfaces, I hope viewers find moments of reflection and make their own connections to the stories within the work.
My process is very tactile. I learn through my hands, through trial and error, and through the small discoveries that happen while making. Clay and hand-building remain especially meaningful to me, but I also like pushing the work further with assemblage, painting, fabric, plastic, and resin.
Clay gives me a direct connection to the hand and to the physical act of shaping something from the ground up. Fabric, plastic, and found materials let me bring in texture, color, and contrast that feel connected to everyday life. Resin helps me build depth, transparency, and a sense of light within the surface.
Layering these materials helps me move between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, creating pieces that feel colorful, textured, and alive.
Even when I begin, my work changes as I develop it. I research, question, and think through my methods, but I also try to stay open to what the materials reveal along the way.
Making art gives me a quiet place to reflect. It helps me understand myself more deeply and pay closer attention to the world around me. Each piece becomes a record of that process, shaped by memory, intuition, material, and care.
At its heart, my work comes from a belief that art can hold emotion, open space for reflection, and offer moments of healing. This idea has led me to my latest work, a series based on the metamorphosis of aging, the physical and the mental process of getting old. I want to explore more deeply into this idea of what we were and what we become over time. The effects society puts on us, especially women, of what is beauty and what is accepted.