Carissa Perez | My Grandmother's Hands

Carissa Perez, My Grandmother's Hands, ink & colored pencil on paper, 9x17 in.

INSPIRATION
My grandmother’s hands bled so my hands could build.

As a child, I remember going to mass with my grandmother; her passion and devotion pierced the veil into her secular life. During prayer, I held her hands in awe at the scars that dressed them. Her life’s labor cut into her palms and yet she was often perceived as a frail, small, and weak woman by those around her.

My grandmother labored in the fields of west Texas for years to create a better life for her family. Her strength should be seen and her sacrifices should be acknowledged and magnified so everyone knows exactly why my hands get to be clean while hers still bare the seeds of pain.

To create this drawing, I use the tools typically used for my architecture design, ink and colored pencil. I used red for the cotton in the same way I would use red in an architecture drawing to show a correction to a design. I want the history of my grandmother’s story to be corrected. I want people to know I come from a long line of strong women.

ARTIST STATEMENT
My Grandmother speaks and I listen, I write, and I create as a stranger coming to my heritage for the first time ready to learn. My current body of work, “Roots” combines my training in architectural design and my experience in fine art to create an artistic analysis of my own complex family history. The artwork addresses community dynamics of cultural erasure within preservation practices through the lens of architecture, religion, and politics to arrive at imagery that depicts a compelling awareness of populations’ histories slowly being buried generation by generation.

My work is informed by a fractured understanding of what my immigrant ancestors sacrificed and how easily it is for history to die with the last person to carry those stories. My goal is to plant a seed of curiosity within myself but also my community about the importance of preservation specifically in the US, Mexico, and Spain; the 3 locations I have spent the last 5 years traveling to and from to be with family.

Currently, I am working on a lino carving intended for fundraiser prints for a small town outside of Parral, Mexico to help raise money for the preservation of their town temple. As a result of some health concerns, I am also reevaluating my relationship with my own hands through sketches. Laboring in a way that leaves physical traces, like the scars my grandparents acquired from years of work as farmhands and pickers in West Texas is my current subject of interest.