Quien Viene A Rescatar Los Ángeles Heridos?
(La Flor Que Carga Alma De Un Muerto)
/
Who Saves The Wounded Angel?
(The Flower That Carries The Soul Of The Dead)
2026
Hair and Paper Mache
Inspired by the wounded healer, Chiron, *¿Quién Viene A Rescatar Los Ángeles Heridos? (La Flor Que Carga Alma De Un Muerto)* asks who comes to save the person who has always been strong. Though Chiron had the power to heal anyone else's ailments, he could never heal himself. Instead, he learned to live with his incurable wound.
This piece imagines a long braid of hair descending from the sky like a rope dropped down to save you. Three yellow butterflies travel upward along the braid, guiding you toward the heavens. I question who comes to save the wounded angel because I have always wondered who comes to save the strongest person, the resilient person, the person who has always helped others, carried responsibilities, or survived the hardest lives. Eventually the weight of those burdens becomes overwhelming. It feels like drowning, as though the water has finally reached your neck, and all you wish for is a rope to fall from the sky and pull you to safety.
But the rope is not a rope at all. It is a long braid of hair, perhaps belonging to another angel who is also risking being wounded in order to save you.
The work reflects a cycle of despair and strength, of wounds that never fully heal. We revisit old wounds through one another, confronting them in every person we meet and every relationship we form. We are faced with the choice to save one another or never drop the rope.
Visitors are invited to participate by bringing yellow flowers and leaving petals at the base of the braid as an offering. Over the course of the exhibition, these offerings become acts of remembrance, care, grief, and love.
The yellow butterflies and flowers reference *One Hundred Years of Solitude,* throughout the novel, yellow butterflies appear as symbols of love, desire, conflict, haunting, and death, moving between the living and spiritual worlds. The subtitle, *La Flor Que Carga Alma De Un Muerto* (The Flower That Carries the Soul of the Dead), references the moment when a rain of tiny yellow flowers falls from the sky after the death of José Arcadio Buendía, when nature itself mourns the creator of Macondo.
Here, the yellow flowers become offerings that carry memory, grief, and the souls of those who came before us. The butterflies remain as guides, moving between the living and the dead, reminding us that healing is rarely something we do alone. They guide us through love and conflict, and toward one another when we need saving most.
I dedicate this piece to one of my best friends, Roy.
Much of my work over the last few years has circled around death, mourning, grief, heartbreak, and loss. I have returned to the feeling that grief can be so heavy, painful, and consuming that it feels like drowning, falling, or suffocating. At the time, I did not always understand what I was making or why I kept returning to these themes. Looking back now, I realize I was trying to make sense of loss and the waves of emotion that follow it.
The spells of depression that have come to me all my life, I never understood the dark cloud over me and sometimes the dark cloud doesn’t rain and sometimes sun comes in but it’s never fully gone. Revisiting this body of work now, I recognize those feelings woven throughout it.
I dedicate this piece to Roy because he was the kind of friend who witnessed those waves and stayed. He saw the periods when I isolated myself, when I could not leave my room, when I did not have the energy to be around other people, and he showed up anyway. He recognized when I no longer had the capacity to enjoy life, and instead of turning away, he met me where I was.
He was the person who dropped the rope.
This piece is dedicated to his memory and to all the people who choose to stay, who reach back for us when we are drowning, and who remind us that we do not have to carry our wounds alone.