Jenny Feal arrived in Miami without any art or materials—“just two hands,” she says, “and energy.” For the Havana-born, Lyon-based artist, visiting Florida was to be in a place of familiarity, where the weather, smells, and Spanish language summoned her back to her homeland of Cuba. She thus turned to her surroundings as a source material, taking walks and returning to the residency house with all sorts of objects: plants, shoes, coconuts. 

Using her favored mark-making elements of clay and water, she drew each item to scale, the resulting images wispy, reddish copies of reality. “It was not really about a topic but about form or color or maybe a way to have a joke between them,” Feal says of her studies. “I started to think about the history of the objects, which we cannot find in Europe—I have no more of this nature in my life now.” Such notions of loss and absence are core to her work, which is rooted in her Cuban identity and often responds to histories of migration and displacement. Feal is used to working on a much larger scale, however: she typically builds installations out of wicker, earthenware, wood, and other natural materials that together evoke a strange isolation, as if one arrived on the heels of another’s departure, and in their relocation of terrestrial matter recast habitual landscapes as sites of possibility. 

Focusing on materials sourced from the Floridian environment allowed Feal to think more deeply about objects as vessels and metaphors, and all the meanings they can embody across time and geographic boundaries. Significantly, devoting her month to drawing also marked a valuable return to working on paper. “It was a break for me to take my time and discover new forms,” she says. “It was therapy.”