My practice explores the intersections of culture, realism, and spirituality through painting and ceramics. I am drawn to the liminal space of being in-between (between cultures, languages, and genders) and use my work to both articulate and honor that fluid state. Symbolism plays a vital role in how I translate memory and belonging. Recurring motifs such as water, domestic interiors, and animals function as portals between lived experience and ancestral imagination.

Formally, my paintings merge observation and invention. I build compositions from family photos, domestic spaces, and imagined landscapes, layering gestural brushstrokes to create shifting spatial relationships. My ceramic vessels honor rituals passed down and reimagined, serving as sites of continuity and transformation. They extend my imagery into three-dimensional space, bridging gesture, touch, and memory. Ceramics is a new medium I am exploring, allowing me to engage materiality, ritual, and embodiment in new ways that complement my painting practice.

Influenced by magical realism and queer phenomenology, I treat painting as a way to materialize what exists within the threshold of my Latinx and American upbringing and my gender fluidity. My work traces how histories migrate through matter, how color and light can hold memory, and how storytelling becomes a way of sustaining connection across distance.

Contact: info@wendyyamilett.com