Amaryllis R. Flowers has an ever-expanding hunger for creating, and it shows in almost every aspect of her art. Long pigtails of neon lavender hair flow down to a ceramic body, covered in inscriptions, carvings, and with a glittery signature that if hit with light, explodes into iridescence.
In her latest exhibition, Pursuing Defeat, the queer Puerto Rican artist returns from New York, where she lives and works, to the familiar sense of home in Santa Fe. After years of moving around the country, she’s returning to the place where she began creating art with a show at Hecho a Mano.
“It [Santa Fe] was the first place that I felt anchored,” says the artist, who holds a master’s degree in fine art from the Yale School of Art and a bachelor’s in fine art from the California College of Arts and Crafts. “I was able to learn a city in a way that I just hadn’t been able to before.” Flowers says she learned from other artists while honing her craft, with help from the community of friends and creatives that surrounded her here.
Through her work, she constructs a vibrant visual language and melds her own culture with symbols that embody a “monstrous” vision of queer identity and femininity. Flowers’ practice delves into drawing, sculpture, video, and performance. Most of her pastel ceramic figurines, paintings, and sculptural elements on paper evoke an innate need to explore and find clarity in what actually matters.
Flowers breaks away from traditional storytelling through her expansive use of clay, paper, and large sculpted femme cyclops as a canvas; she says she often has a hard time finding a stopping point in her sculpting or not adding more layers to a piece.
“I need a hard deadline so that I stop adding stuff to everything,” the artist says. “I will forever keep adding stuff. It’s more of a feeling, when you get really hungry and all you can focus on is getting food. And once you eat, it’s like you can finally relax again.”
Flowers intertwines themes of childhood wonder in regard to queerness, discovering yourself, and processing guilt — and living with the idea of queerness and femininity. She says when she was younger, the small town she lived in was where she learned to feel shame for her differences. “I realized how isolated younger people are who are different,” she says.
“My biggest ambition about the work is having a language — a visual imagery that helps people like those same kids, the kid I was, feel less alone and more alive,” Flowers adds.
Her art inspires a feeling of acceptance, allowing the viewer to revel in their differences, to take pleasure in spaces and things that are designed to elicit feelings of shame. Pursuing Defeat explores a fantastical world that involves an overload of visual information, from hyper-feminine figures to fantastical video game maps, with each piece littered with Where’s Waldo references.
The viewer’s journey is intended to be part of Flowers’ work, revealing a pursuit of adventuring through life’s toughest and brightest moments along with rediscovering a child-like whimsy of experiences that can range from being completely lost to finding yourself. “Pursuing Defeat itself is like an adventure,” she says, “even if it’s a hard one.” — Cielo Rodriguez