Sara Flores
Sara Flores was born in 1950 in Tanbo Mayo, an Indigenous community of the Peruvian Amazon. At fourteen she started her apprenticeship in the arts under the guidance of her mother. Her artistic practice is characterized by a peculiar kind of abstract painting that distinguishes for infinite varieties of lineal designs of intricate exactitude. Kenè, as it is called in the Shipibo language, is a complex genre whose almost cybernetic codified system taps into the substrate of existence, to a healing design or design medicine, to a musical pattern accompanying the healing song of a shaman. In ways that hint to an implicit awareness of the transformative properties of art, certain diseases are thought to be caused by harmful designs that must be magically unraveled and replaced with orderly ones. In other words, the visual imagination of the work is not only on the surface of the canvas but performs the possibilities of a wider synaesthetic world of perception in which multiple forms of energy, sound, bodies, and space are entangled. The variations motifs—hand-drawn in free form—reveal the mind-bending way in which the patterns are stored mnemonically then mapped back onto the canvas, almost like neuronal mapping or an exercise in connectomics. Not only the use of vegetal pigments but also the flowery accents of the shapes and an intrinsic sense of germination—the end-curls of the main motifs sprout like tendrils—hint at the botanical realm, revealing an inseparable linkage with plant-medicine.
