Can a story be embodied in a work of art? Daniela Gomez Paz is a weaver of layered, intimate narratives. Her human-scaled pieces, which she calls entanglements between sculpture, painting, and embroidered, play with the logical and the poetic, memory, and biology. Born in Cali, Colombia, Gomez Paz immigrated to Queens, NYC, when she was 8. “Weaving is a thinking framework, a map of how we were diagrammed,” she says. The Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik wrote, “el cuerpo se acuerda de un amor, como encender la lampara.” ( the body remembers love/ a lover like lighting up a lamp). Gomez Paz’s entangled sculptures are also layered with different stories of home, questions about femininity, and migration that seem to light up, like a lamp, as the viewer approaches them.  

The works created for her recent exhibition, “Corrientes enmarañadas / Streams of entanglements” (2024, NOON Projects) are fleshy and vivid, tender like open wounds, synthetic and organic, each layer disclosing a history of the body as a home for remembrances. “I work in different styles, but they are all connected, consisting of coiled forms, fiber sculptures, found objects, and tapestries,” she expressed. Her medium-scaled, square-shaped piece, Grietas en su Apoyo/ Light in the Dark (2023), is a skin biopsy sample open to the public. Tangled layers of cloth reveal different elements: dried sunflowers, vintage handkerchiefs, a basket, a small mold of the artist’s hand made of plaster and beeswax, and a used soft sweater. Here, Gomez Paz questions the categoric identity of femininity. “What is femininity? How do we look at it? How does it come through color, motion, and tactility? How has it existed historically? How has it been constructed in the home?” she asks. Another work displayed at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, a blood-red large-scale dynamic installation Tesando Agujeros (2023), hangs from the ceiling and is meant to dangle, turn, and move. “Tesar means to tighten in Spanish,” Gomez Paz explains, and is indicative of how she crafted the work, coiling different red forms to mimic “blood clots, fiber, skin and muscle tissue, and the flowing of menstruation blood,” she adds, while also giving up control of its final form, and letting each thread pull and depend on the other. 

Her June residency in Miami allowed the artist to focus on reflection rather than production. She found time to experiment with materials and pondered on topics such as lightness, weight, and gravity. But Florida will only let you get away if you consider what is happening to its climate. After one of the many summer storms had passed, flooding part of her studio garage, Gomez Paz also got to think about color and how it reflects on different surfaces, including water.  “I had this textile work which reflected on the water with all the debris. It was a crucial reminder of the climate conditions we live in,” she added.