New Prophets

New Prophets is a series of intricately crafted micro-universes that honour the spiritual and aesthetic legacies of the past while reimagining them for today’s world. Blending textile, sculpture, and painting, these richly embroidered works reinterpret historical symbols and narratives ranging from prophetic visions to Mozarabic architecture. Drawing on diverse cultural traditions and iconographies, these works seek to activate a sense of magical thinking, using form, colour, and space to invite moments of reflection and presence. In doing so, the series becomes a gesture toward continuity—recognising the vast circulation of ideas, images, and people that shaped our histories. New Prophets offers not only aesthetic experience, but a call to imagine deeper forms of resonance, vibrant spaces where inherited symbols are not fixed relics, but portals to transformative ways of seeing and being.

Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream
From the series New Prophets, 2023.
Sequins, glass beads and gold leaf on canvas; wood, clay, plaster, gesso, acrylic and glass rhinestones.
80x70x5cm

Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream reinterprets an ancient prophetic vision through a contemporary lens, stitching together past and future in sequins, beads, and glass rhinestones. Inspired by the biblical story of the Babylonian king whose dream foretold the fall of great empires, this richly embroidered work invites us to reconsider that vision in the shadow of ecological collapse and extractive futures.

Set against a shimmering gold ground reminiscent of sacred iconography, the central figure of Nebuchadnezzar appears encased in a radiant aura, simultaneously majestic and vulnerable. Overhead, as humanity begins to eye asteroids and near-Earth objects in its relentless pursuit of rare metals, a satellite hovers nearby while a blazing meteor streaks across the sky, echoing the apocalyptic force from the original prophecy.

At the base of the composition, the Salar de Uyuni is depicted through two monumental cacti and salt mounds. This ancestral land, inhabited by the Indigenous Aymara people, is currently being ransacked and depleted of natural resources as it holds one of the planet’s largest lithium reserves. The whole composition is built on the same cycles of exploitation that the ancient dream sought to condemn.

The work, including a rhinestone-encrusted frame, merges textile, sculpture, and painting into a relic of layered temporalities, linking myth and material, past and possibility. Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream becomes cautionary tale about human power, ego and greed, linking the collapse of civilisations to environmental degradation and the disregarded costs of technological progress. Who will be left standing when the statue falls again?

 

 

La Palma Me Llevó El Alma.
From the series New Prophets, 2024.
Sequins, glass beads and gold leaf on canvas; wood, clay, plaster, gesso, acrylic and glass rhinestones.
80x70x5cm

La Palma Me Llevó el Alma brings together natural and architectural symbols that have long traversed cultural boundaries: the date palm tree and the horseshoe arch. Rendered in radiant embroidery and framed in a coral-colored plaster frame adorned with glass rhinestones, the work fuses textile, sculpture, and painting into an introspection on shared heritage.

The central composition features a stylized palm tree nestled within an ornate horseshoe arch, a form emblematic of the western Islamic world and particularly resonant in the Iberian Peninsula. Often associated with al-Andalus, the arch here becomes a portal inviting viewers to reflect on centuries of exchange and transformation. The palm tree, celebrated across the Mediterranean and North Africa as a symbol of life, prosperity and abundance, stretches upward, showing off its glittering sequined fronds and beaded dates.

This piece was sparked by the artist’s visit to the hermitage of San Baudelio de Berlanga, an 11th-century sanctuary in northern Spain that embodies the spirit of Mozarabic architecture—a blend of Visigothic, pre-Romanesque, Islamic, and Byzantine traditions. La Palma Me Llevó el Alma becomes an homage to intercultural symbols and layered histories.

With its gold-ground luminosity and precious surface, the work offers not just a visual experience, but a poetic gesture toward a more interconnected and generous understanding of culture: a space where roots are shared and value emerges from entanglement.

 

 

I Know That You Are By My Side.
From the series New Prophets, 2024.
Sequins, glass beads and gold leaf on canvas; wood, clay, plaster, gesso, acrylic and glass rhinestones.
80x70x5cm

Gold grounded and encrusted with sequins, glass beads, and rhinestones, this work draws on the visual language of medieval illuminated manuscripts while reimagining it through tactile media. Embroidery, traditionally a domestic and gendered craft, is elevated to a site of resistance, stitched into a richly symbolic image that aims to challenge centuries of representation.

At the center of the piece, a female figure sits enthroned beneath a jeweled archway, surrounded by shimmering faces and luminous textures. The ornamental plaster frame, brightly painted and inlaid with glass rhinestones, pushes the piece into the realm of sculpture, transforming the image into a magical icon, a hybrid of textile, painting, and object. Through its radiant surface and layered symbolism, the work critiques the historical binary of purity and temptation imposed on women in European art. Here, the subject is neither muse nor martyr, but an active presence—embodied, empowered, and gloriously adorned on her own terms.

This artwork is not only a visual feast, but also a quiet act of reclamation, reworking inherited forms to question who gets to be venerated, how, and why.