ARTIST STATEMENT
Across Oceans is a homage to the known and unknown women who passed down the ritual of cooking plantain down to me, across oceans and generations. For people living away from their ancestral homelands, food can be seen as a kind of alchemy for healing both body and ancestral memory, as well as a ritual for travelling across time and space.
This work confronts the often-silenced stories of cooking, medicinal plant knowledge, and the culinary history of generational recipes buried through colonization and gendered labor.
Depicting ecological symbols, women’s bodies and their often-erased gendered labor, Godreau Soria uses figurative portraiture to explore themes of memory, belonging, and embodiment for people living outside of their ancestral homelands. Her multidisciplinary art practice is heavily influenced by her ancestry, earth kinship, and the anticolonial resistance of the Caribbean. She works primarily with paper, water-based pigments, relief printmaking, and recently, sound.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nicole Godreau Soria is a multimedia artist living and working between the SF Bay Area and Orlando, Florida. She has a Bachelor’s of Social Work from the University of Central Florida. Being raised between Ohio, Ecuador, and Florida, she aims to expand the collective narrative of women living in diaspora. Her works have been exhibited online and in the SF Bay Area.
© Nicole Godreau Soria