My work explores the relationship between observation and imagination as a response to the invented world — the world that humans have constructed, which sometimes distances itself from life.
Through drawing, painting, and poetic language, I have a deep feeling for imagination and intuition, nurturing them like an animal that we all carry inside and can care for. I call it animal furioso because I see it running so fast that she has never known its shape. It reminds me that paying attention to the phenomenon of imagination can transform our understanding of both the invented world and our inner world.
I seek to unearth what is hidden beneath the surface, softening rigid ideas and questioning what we have accepted as true or the dogmas that society perhaps does not need. This search is inspired by the concept of “looking for the back of God,” a metaphor for finding deeper truths beyond the obvious and for examining the reverse of things.
The greatest act of magic I know is the sun that comes from afar to make the world visible; the second is to call the sun by its name. Life is as supernatural as trying to name it, as shedding tears when we are moved, and as wanting to create images because the world echoes within us.
In my guts, I carry wonder, and in my eyelashes, the doubt of what I cannot see. Looking at the world fills me with a very fierce tenderness.
I create images to prove that I was once here.
I create images to attempt to preserve an event.
I create images to wrap myself in.
I create images to listen to what the stones have to say.
I create images to learn to speak the mother tongue of life.
I create images to see the minuscule point where the universe began because I couldn’t go see it that day.
I create images so that ‘the obvious’ extinguishes itself. I create images to see how life grows.
I create images to reveal and to reveal myself.
I’ve already written a poem about the sun, painted the phenomenon of the three suns in China, and made a slow-motion film of the ray of sun that crossed the window at Mom’s house. Yet still, my hands remain cold.
I create images so that blinking becomes a miracle.
Manuela Caicedo is a Colombian artist, living in New York. She studied at La Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia, where she received a meritorious thesis award for her first film, "Les dejé fresas en mi bolsillo mientras llega el día en que se apaguen los soles" (I left strawberries in my pocket until the day the suns go out), a combination of painting, drawing, and performance.
She recently graduated with an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art. After which she received the Chubb Fellowship award. Her work explores visual poetry and the human capacity to imagine, which she considers a miracle. Her artistic journey has been supported by grants, including the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the Academy Scholar Award.