Etapa de Floración (Flowering Stage) is a two-painting series that reimagines inherited labor through a lens of growth, care, and transformation. In traditional Salvadoran landscapes, women are often depicted carrying cántaros or baskets on their heads, symbols of endurance, survival, and generational responsibility.
In these works, that weight is replaced with crowns of blooming flowers. Each figure carries her own garden, transforming the body from a site of burden into one of cultivation. The garden is not external, but held, tended, and brought into bloom.
Together, the paintings reflect a shared cycle. Each figure embodies a different stage of becoming, where inherited strain gives way to intentional healing, and survival softens into abundance. The flowers represent quiet pleasures once deferred: rest, beauty, softness, and the right to exist beyond necessity.
This series honors the women who carried before me while imagining a new inheritance. One rooted not in weight, but in life, color, and possibility.
In a time marked by instability, these works insist on joy as a deliberate act. A blooming that persists. A garden that is both memory and becoming.
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Did you know that in El Salvador, when a family doesn’t have access to water services in their home, on average, they carry 2 to 4 cántaros (water jugs) of water each day, over a distance of approximately 0.3 miles and an elevation change of up to approximately 100 feet? The majority of this burden is carried by women and children. Organizations like Healing Waters International are working tirelessly to address this critical issue in El Salvador.
