Borrachero (Angel's trumpets)

Bronze, horse hair, silk, estera palm (2026)

Borrachero (Angel's trumpets)

Bronze, horse hair, silk, estera palm (2026)

Borrachero (Angel's trumpets)

Bronze, horse hair, silk, estera palm (2026)

My mother told me never to lie under the borrachero tree. That plant is dangerous, she said, don’t let it near you. Years later, I cast it in bronze, suspended it from horsehair, and let it hang close to the floor above a woven mat, the kind my grandparents spread under trees to rest. An invitation to fall under its effects.

That work began with a private memory and arrived somewhere else. The collective sense of fear and risk produced by the plant and its colonial history in Victorian conservatories, stripped of everything it carried, and turned it into an ornament.

The sculpture operates like a small stage set. The flower could drop at any moment. The mat is there, waiting. The viewer is asked, without being asked, whether they will lie down beneath the thing their own family warned them about. That hesitation is part of the work. Not a metaphor for risk: a structure that produces a sliver of it.

Bronze is the material of monuments, of heroes cast for permanence and public memory. Here it holds the shape of the plant that undoes memory, that strips a person of will, of recollection, of the ability to refuse. The colonial conservatories that kept borrachero as ornament had already done something similar: extracted the plant from everything it carried and displayed what remained. The sculpture doesn’t depict that history. It tries to make you feel the edge of it, physically, in the room.