Kukuli Velarde

Kukuli is a painter and ceramicist, whose work seeks to find a space within the international cultural arena for her Peruvian heritage to continue evolving as a contemporary cultural form.  Her ceramic series/installation, Plunder Me, Baby, borrows from pre-Columbian ceramic traditions to create fantastical clay figures that confront contemporary topics such as gender and identity issues and socio-political concerns. In her paintings, Kukuli uses the female body—her own body—as a point of departure, exploring what ownership of the female body means in the arts. Cadavers, a life-size portrait series, comments on how the Catholic religion was an effective tool of colonization and exposes how many of us will never fit into Western standards and hierarchies of beauty. Her work candidly intends to expose the hypocrisy of a society where women struggle to be respected.