Mariachi Traje De Azul
2024
Independent Study With Professor Enrique Leal
In Fall 2024, I did an independent study with Professor Enrique Leal at UCSC. My project uses research about textiles, embroidery design, and overall documentation of the on-campus Mariachi Eterno De UCSC. The photos are images taken at media day for the Mariachi, during performances, and practices. The photos were then printed on cyanotype fabrics, layered with a screen print of the embroidery design from Mariachi Eterno trajes, and finished with a last layer of embroidery. All the fabric pieces, including the scarf, were sewn onto a jacket representing the Mariachi trajes.
Modeled By Carlo Armenta Mariachi From Mariachi Eterno De UCSC
Front of the Jacket
Back Of the Jacket
Heat Transfer Hockey Jersey
2023-2024
Over a dozen hockey portraits and images of the UCSC Ice Hockey Team were collaged and heat tranfered on to a #37 Slug Jersey
Screen-printed Bird Patch Jacket
2025
Screen-Printed Bird Patch Jacket is a wearable art piece that explores movement, resilience, and individuality. Through hand-screen printing and layered patchwork, the jacket transforms images of birds into symbols of freedom and adaptation.
Cyanotype Hondurean Dress (Work In Progress)
2025- Present
This piece began in the spring of 2025 as my final project for Magnified Imagination, a course focused on observing insects and natural forms through microscopic equipment. Through this close study of life often overlooked, I became interested in how scale, fragility, and transformation shape our understanding of the natural world.
For the final project, I created cyanotype prints on a traditional Honduran dress that once belonged to my late grandmother. The dress functions as both material and memory, carrying personal history alongside cultural tradition. By printing microscopic imagery onto this garment, I bring together scientific observation and inherited knowledge, connecting the intimate body scale with the vast cycles of nature.
This work explores Central American relationships to death, rebirth, and continuity through myth, environment, and tradition. Rather than treating death as an ending, the piece reflects cyclical understandings of life. The use of cyanotype, a process dependent on light, time, and exposure, mirrors these natural cycles.
This piece marks the beginning of a larger ongoing project. I continue to investigate how ancestral materials, ecological systems, and mythological narratives intersect, using process-based methods to reflect on loss, inheritance, and transformation.
