Multidisciplinary Designer
Spatial Design | Textile Art | Immersive Storytelling
WIDOW
An immersive textile installation that invites viewers into a visceral, poetic meditation on loss, grief, and the enduring cultural stigma that continues to shadow widows’ identities.
Master of Professional Studies | ITP-Thesis, New York University
ITP-NYU Gallery | New York, USA 2019
Today widowhood:
invisible and everywhere
The sculpture, set within a vertical wooden loom, takes the form of a deconstructed cage skirt. By incorporating torn black textiles, embroidery, and embedded electronics, "Widow" reinterprets traditional Victorian mourning garments. This work symbolizes the unraveling and social marginalization that women experience in widowhood.
Exploring grief, resilience,
and the tactile language of e-textiles
Embroidery as Touch
The loom supports embroidered tulle stripes that carry the secondary losses of widowhood—loss of income, security, social status, dreams for the future, support system, confidence, home, and friendship. Each word is stitched with conductive thread that functions as a touch-sensitive sensor.
When the viewers touch the textured words, the sensors activate the sculpture’s light, which gradually fades into darkness, translating touch into a tactile rhythm of presence and absence.
Poetry as Emotion
As viewers continue interacting with the piece, an audio response is triggered. Absences, a poem written by the artist to capture the moment of losing a loved one, emerges through sound.
Three versions of the poem are heard: one recited in Spanish, one in English, and one sung. These layered voices deepen the sensory experience, offering distinct emotional connections to the shared landscape of loss.
Absences | no words | one minute | a silence | deeper
Light as Repair
As the poem unfolds, the sculpture gradually glows with golden light. Inspired by kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, where the cracks are not hidden, this gesture makes visible the invisible grief experienced in widowhood, transforming the broken cage skirt into the wholeness of Widow
