Oil on linen

26cm by 31cm

2024

Apu Pachamama explores the sacred landscape through the personification of the mountain as a woman. Drawing on Andean understandings of Pachamama—the living Earth—and the Apu, the spiritual presence or protective spirit of the mountain, the figure becomes both human and elemental: a manifestation of the land itself.

Her form is not positioned simply within the land; she emerges as its spirit and embodiment. Her presence suggests the mountain as maternal, enduring and conscious, holding a deep relationship with the people, animals and ecosystems around her. Through her gaze and stillness, she becomes a threshold between the physical and spiritual worlds.

I am interested in how the female figure can embody nature without becoming merely symbolic or decorative. She carries the scale, strength and vulnerability of the landscape, while also evoking ideas of ancestry, fertility, protection and memory. Apu Pachamama is therefore a portrait not of a particular woman, but of the living mountain imagined through human form.