Nereida Patricia

Cob is pleased to present Devotion the resulting exhibition of the fourth Cob Award residency recipient, Nereida Patricia. Working in the gallery's onsite studio until the start of September, the site-specific exhibition represents the culmination of extensive research and development under the residency programme.

Working through material and gesture, Nereida Patricia captures limits of the human form via explorations into how dichotomies of freedom and constraint effect the body. The artist utilises their own body, heritage, and lived experience as the first point of reference to create new mythologies that centre Black and brown people in trans and marginalised communities, as well as those living and working in the street.

Nereida Patricia’s new body of work for the end of residency exhibition focuses on a suite of large scale glass beaded relief paintings, which are collaged with concrete, glass dust, acrylic, and oil paint to create multilayered images in bas-relief that chronicle gender, race and sexual politics. Works are inspired by political feminist craft traditions like Arpilleras, which became popular under dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, and the spiritual beaded quilts of Haitian drapo vodou, yet aim to create a visual language of their own. With an eye for cosmology and the spiritual over identity politics, Patricia creates mythologies that relate to the human body yet shift towards allegory as an operation of worldbuilding and systemic healing.