Wendy Yamilett’s (they/them/she/her) practice explores the intersections of culture, realism, and spirituality through painting and ceramics. They are interested in liminal states—between cultures, languages, and genders—and uses their work to examine how identity, memory, and belonging are shaped within these in-between spaces. Symbolism plays a central role in their work; recurring motifs such as water, domestic interiors, and animals function as connective elements between personal experience and inherited histories.

Formally, their paintings combine observation and invention. They build compositions from family photographs, domestic spaces, and imagined landscapes, using layered brushwork to create shifting spatial relationships. These constructed spaces reflect how memory operates as fragmented, unstable, and continually re-formed rather than fixed or singular. Color and light are used deliberately to convey emotional and historical resonance.

In addition to painting, they work with ceramics as a developing part of her practice. Their ceramic vessels draw from ritual forms that have been passed down and reinterpreted, extending their visual language into three-dimensional space. Working in clay allows them to engage materiality, touch, and process, offering a different way to think through continuity, transformation, and care. Ceramics complements their painting practice by emphasizing physical engagement and embodied making.

Influenced by magical realism and queer phenomenology, their work addresses how histories move through bodies, objects, and spaces. Across both mediums, they are interested in how storytelling functions as a means of sustaining connection across distance and how visual form can hold experiences shaped by migration, gender fluidity, and cultural inheritance.

Wendy Yamilett is an MFA candidate in Painting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is currently based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Contact: info@wendyyamilett.com