everything left was carried
everything left was carried
Phipps Visiting Assistant Professor Rebecca Padilla
On view in the Vicki Myhren Gallery June 27 through July 26
Join us for the opening reception on Friday, June 27 from 5-7 PM
Rebecca Padilla is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Oklahoma and a Master of Fine Art at Arizona State University. After moving to the United States at age 10, she has lived a transient life and is influenced by the many places she has loved. Her work explores themes of transience, place, and attunement through site-responsive projects and a wide variety of materials and sculptural processes. She grounds her practice in the words of anthropologist Tim Ingold – “The forms of objects are not imposed from above, but grow from the mutual involvement of people and materials in an environment..-we work from within the world, not upon it”. Ultimately, she strives to make work that deepens our understanding and care of the landscapes in which we dwell.
This body of work is an exploration of what it means to carry– grief, memory, matter– in the wake of ecological collapse, dislocation, and the generational inheritance of these ruptures. What remains when landscapes are fractured and built environments crumble? Everything left– rust, sediment, seed, sorrow– to be carried onward.
Through sculpture, installation, and material assemblage, these works trace the ways bodies, both human and more-than-human, become vessels of memory and meaning. Seed pods, concrete, salt, and other residues of disrupted geographies speak not as relics, but as avenues for relationships with the places in which we dwell. They bear witness to an often slow violence of environmental loss, the aftermath of extractive practices, and the persistence of care in the midst of it.
Here, acts of holding and carrying are not passive, but serve as methods of resistance, of remaining in relation with what is fractured or overlooked. These works craft a narrative of attention and attunement in order to craft tenderness amidst collapse. Carrying and holding become a form of survival, an insistence on connection, and a quiet proposition for repair.
