lucero Vargas Almeida

Artist Statement

My artistic practice is rooted in textile art as a living archive of memory, migration, and transformation. I work primarily with reclaimed fabrics, hand stitching, embroidery, and found materials that carry personal, familial, and cultural histories. Many of these textiles come from garments that once belonged to women in my family or from second-hand clothing that already holds traces of other lives. Through this process, fabric becomes more than material: it becomes presence, witness, and language.

My work is deeply informed by the tradition of Latin American arpilleras—not only as a textile form, but as a way of making visible what is often silenced: memory, displacement, resilience, ancestry, care, and survival. Stitching becomes both an aesthetic and an ethical gesture—a way of repairing, honouring, and transforming lived experience into form. Each thread holds emotional knowledge; each fragment carries a story.

I move between the intimate and the collective, exploring how personal histories intersect with broader experiences of migration, intergenerational memory, and intercultural belonging. I am interested in how cloth can hold memory the way skin holds touch—through layers, marks, softness, rupture, and endurance.

Born from the Universal Sea / Nacida del mar universal emerges from a deeply personal and intergenerational process. The work is constructed using reclaimed textiles, including garments worn and handmade by my mother. Some elements—such as buttons and details—were carefully chosen by her for each piece, carrying her presence, her gestures, and her sensibility into the work. These materials hold not only memory, but a living continuity between generations.

Through an organic form reminiscent of a heliconia, the piece explores origin, emergence, and the fluid relationship between body, memory, and life itself. It reflects on how identity is shaped through movement, inheritance, and transformation.

A poem accompanies this work as an integral extension of its conceptual language, allowing memory to move between textile and word, between material and voice.

Across my practice, I seek to create works that are materially humble yet emotionally expansive—where discarded cloth becomes testimony, stitching becomes voice, and textile surfaces become spaces of remembrance, resistance, and living presence.
Poem (excerpt from Born from the Universal Sea)

Arriving like storm water in the current of life,
carried through valleys, rivers, and cascades,
until one day, without warning,
we were lost in different currents.
…
Within the universal sea of life,
the untamed heliconia is born.
Luciérnaga Azul