Without Citizenship

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s drawings are influenced by film, fairy tales, botanical and zoological textbooks, as well as from her personal background. Since 1997, the Artist finishes her drawings by dipping them in wax. This process gives her work a unique materiality and emphasizes the pencil line with ambiguous depth. The traditions and myths of her Chilean origins and the influence of Latin-American magic-realist literature are essential in her artistic practice. Religion, mythology, sexuality and the bizarre, reverberate and merge together, trapped beneath the wax coating of her drawings. Her works deal with borderline experiences, femininity, fear and death, as well as poetry, reawakening demons, ghosts, creatures of myth and gloomy dreams. The extremely defined images show desires that stem from both her personal and wider universal experience: they appear ecstatic, traumatic and surrealistic. Frequently working while she travels, her drawings are often stowed in her luggage, functioning as a sort of pictorial diary.

“A sky cracked with stars like a black mirror in the endless night,

In the desert the constellations appeared, They wanted to find me;

They were my mother and my father,

I said goodbye to them and I knew that my fate was in other lands”.

–Sandra Vásquez de la Horra