Mariana Noreña G 
From Bogotá Colombia 
Based in Chicago, Il. USA





My practice explores how humans relate to place through ecology, carpology, history, mythology, and conversation. Through research-driven and site-responsive sculptural installations, I explore the narrative materiality of earth matter and create echoes between natural phenomena and daily life. My process intertwines formalist composition, material research, embodied sensing, and close attention. Through locally derived materials, I tell collective and intimate stories that reveal our complex, symbiotic connection to the environment. These works create accessible experiences in subtle territories, exploring how materials bear witness to a place's complexities, histories, and our interconnected collective memory.


I am drawn to the patterns and rhythms that shape landscapes—the movement of water, the slow erosion of stones, and the way fire reshapes a landscape. These gestures help us decipher the complexity of a place, revealing the hidden structures that bind it together. Through repeated actions—layering, collecting, organizing, eroding, tracing—I engage with the material language of a site, emphasizing that each fragment carries the presence of a larger whole. Whether through seeds, stone, soil, wood, metal or ash, my work acknowledges the continuity of natural processes and invites contemplation on the ways we inhabit, alter, and remember the landscapes around us.


Some works are acts of remembrance, acknowledging what has been lost. Others are acts of listening, attuned to the subtle stories embedded in place. I look to ancestral knowledge, to the wisdom held in land and material, seeking to understand not just where I come from but how we are all tied to the landscapes that sustain us.