LA ENFRIJOLADA by Laura Clay

Original Artwork by Laura Clay

Framed to 49x61

Oil on Jute (paints made with pigments sourced from Venice, Italy)

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Show Statement From the Artist: 

" There is a tunnel at the entrance of Guanajuato, carved through the mountain along an old river. It is tradition to hold your breath and make a wish in the dark of the tunnel. My family has been arriving here this way for generations. My grandmother, Mary Clay Hernández, painted the landscapes of those crossings. Sitting beside her, I learned that a painting could hold more than  an image. It could hold a lineage.

When she passed, I inherited her oil paints. As they ran out, I was left with a question: why couldn't all of my materials carry that same depth of meaning? This realization drove me to strip my practice down to the raw elements and begin hand-milling my own paints.

Now, before dawn in Valenciana, Guanajuato, my father and I ride on horseback to gather cochineal from the wild cacti, the same insects Indigenous artisans in Mexico have used for their deep red dye for thousands of years. I carry that pigment back to my studio in Austin, alongside powders from a small apothecary in Venice and raw minerals from the red dirt of Australia. Every material is a decision. Every decision is a story.

I pair these hand-milled paints with raw linen and jute. The herringbone linen carries an air of refinement. The coarse jute carries the memory of coffee sacks and feed bags, something humbler. I intentionally leave the organic textures, variations, and beauty marks of the fabric completely visible beneath my paint layers because those unique imperfections mirror the variations that make human lives special.

This is the foundation of my Compartment series. It's an exploration of identity as a set of interconnected rooms, each one carrying its own history and memory, and made of its own material. These are the spaces we hold within ourselves. The work is intimate and expansive at once, asking how we organize identity and giving shape to the parts of ourselves that usually stay unseen."