'Pachamama' draws on the presence of Indigenous women, whose figures shift between states of action and stillness. Untethered from a single landscape or moment in time, they emerge and recede across the surface, appearing less as fixed subjects than as fragments of lived experience.

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Through this shifting visual language, Pachamama considers memory as something continually re-formed. Not preserved intact, but felt through what remains, what disappears, and what is reimagined.

Valeria Alvarez is a Colombian artist raised in South London whose practice explores the relationship between history, culture and identity. Working primarily through oil painting, their work is informed by the experience of living between cultures and by an ongoing engagement with heritage, displacement and cultural memory.

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Their practice revisits histories that have been silenced, distorted or overlooked through colonial narratives, with a particular interest in Indigenous ancestry and representation. Bringing personal experience into dialogue with ancestral symbolism, their paintings question inherited versions of history while exploring how identity and memory are carried across places and generations.

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Through painting, Valeria approaches reclamation as both a personal and cultural process, creating space for alternative histories and perspectives to emerge. Rather than presenting the past as fixed, their work engages with its gaps, fragments and uncertainties as sites for reconnection, reflection and reimagining.