BIOGRAPHY
María Dusamp is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York whose work spans fine arts, fabrication, and education. After earning her BFA with Distinction from Pratt Institute and MFA from the School of Visual Arts, she has established herself through numerous exhibitions, including recent shows at the Pfizer Building and The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center. Her work has gained recognition through various platforms, including features in Art Zealous and Quiet Lunch. Dusamp has contributed to significant projects, notably working on theatrical fabrication for Laurie Anderson, and has shared her expertise through workshops at institutions like Howie The Harp Community Access. Her curatorial work includes projects at Starta Arta and Equity Gallery, demonstrating her commitment to both creating and facilitating artistic discourse.
ARTIST STATEMENT
In my practice, I work with modeling clay and resins to excavate memories that live in the body—both personal, and ancestral. Growing up in Bogotá during the aftermath of decades of conflict, I learned early that some stories can only be told through the language of form. My sculptures emerge from this silence, each one a vessel for experiences that resist direct narration.
The process begins with moldmaking, a ritual of negative and positive space that mirrors how trauma reshapes us. I create flexible rubber molds that capture every detail of my initial clay forms. Each subsequent casting emerges different from the last—some crack, others warp, many refuse to release cleanly. These "imperfections" are not mistakes but essential expressions of how memory manifests in matter. Like the stories passed down through generations of Colombian women, each telling leaves its own distinct marks.
My current body of work, "Topografías del Silencio" (Topographies of Silence), explores how the body holds histories of violence while simultaneously harboring the seeds of renewal. The pieces incorporate biomorphic forms that pulse between recognition and abstraction. Some sculptures appear to breathe despite their fixed nature, their surfaces mapped with textures that evoke fingernail marks, flowing water, scar tissue, and ancient earth. Others fragment and reassemble the human figure, suggesting both vulnerability and resilience.
Working in monochrome tones allows me to focus on form and shadow, and the way light reveals or obscures detail—much like how memory illuminates certain moments while leaving others in darkness. The resulting installations create environments that demand quiet attention, inviting viewers to witness these transmutations of pain into beauty, of absence into presence.
I think often of my grandmother's hands arranging flowers, of my mother's sewing home decorations, of the way women in my family have always shaped material to hold what cannot be spoken. My practice extends this lineage while speaking to contemporary concerns about generational trauma, healing, and the body as an archive of experience. Through this work, I aim to create spaces where difficult stories can emerge at their own pace, where the weight of history can be held collectively, and where transformation becomes possible.
The sculptures exist in a liminal space between memory and matter, between personal narrative and collective history. They are neither fully abstract nor completely figurative, but rather occupy the threshold where meaning emerges from form. Like the process of healing itself, each piece is an ongoing negotiation between what was, what is, and what might be. These works are not merely objects to be viewed but experiences to be encountered—each one a proposal for how we might witness and hold space for stories that need telling. In their presence, viewers are invited to recognize their own capacity for both wounding and healing, for bearing witness and being transformed.
Image Courtesy of Alexander Si