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 investigate how geological and ecological processes become narrative structures, how erosion, accumulation, growth, decay, and transformation shape not only landscapes but also the ways we remember, inhabit, and understand them. The processes that shape landscapes are themselves forms of storytelling, and sculpture becomes a way of making those stories legible. My process intertwines formalist composition, material research, embodied sensing, and close attention. Working with locally derived materials, I create echoes between natural phenomena and daily life, telling collective and intimate stories that reveal our complex, symbiotic relationship with the environment. These works create accessible experiences in subtle territories, exploring how materials bear witness to a place's histories, complexities, and our interconnected collective memory.

I work with organic and industrial materials such as soil, water, stone, wood, metal, concrete, moss, and ash, understanding them not as static mediums but as matter already carrying histories and continuously undergoing change. Conditioned to shift over time, these materials challenge conventional ideas of permanence, revealing how traces of geological time, migration, labor, and ecological transformation become evidence of intimate and collective stories.

I am drawn to the patterns and rhythms that shape landscapes like the movement of water, the slow erosion of stones, the dispersal of seeds, the accumulation of sediment, and the way fire reshapes a forest. These gestures are forms of narration, revealing the hidden structures that bind a place together across multiple temporalities. Through repeated actions such as layering, collecting, organizing, eroding, and 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 follows these material narratives, inviting 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 and to the wisdom held in land and material, seeking to understand not only where I come from but how geological and ecological histories continue to shape our collective relationship with the places that sustain us.