ARTIST STATEMENT
My artistic practice explores the intersections of identity, gender, diaspora, migration, and mental health through illustration, painting, printmaking, and text. As someone who grew up mixed-race and in-between cultures, I am driven by the power visual art holds in fostering cross-cultural dialogue through the visual testimony of non-dominant stories. This work is part of a larger ongoing project called “A Home is a Portal,” a collection of visual stories documenting a quest for home amidst the long shadow of ancestral displacement, colonization, and loss of homeland. Part illustrated book, part physical installation, the project visualizes how inherited memory and ancestral loss of homeland can transcend space and time and investigates what a path to healing might look like.
This image documents a grocery shopping experience at a Latin American grocer in Sweden as a means of illustrating the vital role food plays in the lives and spiritual survival of diasporic people. Printed in large format on semi-transparent fabric, this work leverages physicality to explore how embodiment and sensory experience can blur the boundaries between places as well as past, present, and future to ultimately ask: what does it take to conjure the feeling of home?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ludi Leiva is a Canadian-American interdisciplinary artist with roots in Guatemala and Slovakia. Working across illustration, painting, printmaking, installation, and text, her work explores themes of identity, migration, gender, and human inner worlds. Her work has been exhibited in New York City, London, Berlin, and Stockholm, among other places. She holds an MFA in Visual Communication and is based between Stockholm and Los Angeles.
© Ludi Leiva