Maria Patiño is a mixed-media artist and illustrator whose work examines cultural narratives, memory, and belonging through artist’s books, collage, printmaking, and painting.

The Home I Carry transforms personal memory into a living archive, honoring ancestors, past places, people, gestures, and experiences that shape who I am and where I belong. Rooted in histories of migration, the work reflects on how home fractures, shifts, and re-forms over time. Home is not a fixed place; it is embodied, carried through gesture, texture, language, and ritual long after a place has changed or people have moved away.

The installation reimagines the 16th-century cabinet of curiosity as a contemporary archive of memory. Instead of rare specimens, it collects fragments of symbolic objects, marks, and visual messages. Through collage, assemblage, hand stitching, sewing, and mixed media, it explores belonging, displacement, and ancestral connection. Viewers are invited to touch and reflect, discovering that home can live within us in our bodies, memories, and hearts.