Artist Paula Castillo Returns to Her Rural Roots
Castillo’s decision to install her work in a rural campus gallery space drives home the fact that art can, perhaps must, be a daily experience.
By Nancy Zastudil, Hyperallergic - April 12, 2022
BELEN, New Mexico — Sculptor Paula Castillo has revisited her roots with Piggyback, an installation at the University of New Mexico’s Valencia County campus. The artist created the works on view in response to her experience of returning to Belen, New Mexico, the town where she grew up (not far from the campus), to care for her elderly parents.
Castillo is motivated by the interactions between the physical and cultural landscape, and with the works in Piggyback, specifically, an urge to question the “givenness” or assumptions we have about objects, locations, and circumstances. The show is described as “a community memoir and an ode to how the small and humble origins of our first places carry all spectral life movements”; I understand this as a way of expressing that her early experiences in this region have guided her life since. In keeping with the theme of return — renegotiating, supporting, and carrying on — Piggyback revisits some of Castillo’s most persistent materials and imagery.