ARTIST STATEMENT

I make art the way some people dream, without instruction, without the need to resolve, simply as a vessel for whatever moves through me. My practice is rooted in intuition, in the fluid space between consciousness and memory, where the body feels first and the mind interprets later. Creativity has always arrived to me this way. I began as a nine-year-old with graphite in hand, already translating emotions I couldn’t yet name. Throughout high school, art became my language, ultimately carrying me into new worlds through the Houston Rodeo Art Scholarship, $20,000 that placed me at UT and affirmed that my visions were real, worth following, worth sharing.

Today, my work stretches across sound and image, forming a living archive of identity and dream. I am a DJ… mixing vinyl and electronic music, building soundscapes that pulse like heartbeat, memory, ritual. I am a singer, musician, experimenter. My sets and compositions are not merely performances, but portals: invitations into rooms lit in color, into tenderness, into shadow, into release. Music lets me become motion. It lets me dissolve.

Parallel to this, I move through visual mediums with equal devotion: paint, prisma color, graphite, watercolor, digital collage, embroidery, mixed-media sculpture, and most recently, paper-mache. I am drawn to materials that carry history or tactility, textures that feel alive in the hand. I love crafting worlds where softness and darkness coexist, glowing pinks, purples, blues emerging from deep emotional soil. My imagery often returns to the symbol of the eye. The watcher. The watched. A reminder that I am both witness and witnessed - by myself, by spirit, by God, by universe. The eye, to me, is protection as much as revelation. It is the boundary, the portal, the blessing.

Core themes repeat in my work not because I chase them, but because they find me. Queerness, depression, identity, ancestral knowing, ritual, intuition, the multiplicity of self. I explore the hidden rooms, the parts of me that feel like dream, like underwater memory, like prayer spoken through color instead of language. I make art as a way of returning to myself, and perhaps offering others a place to return to as well.

I am also the founder of FLWRPOT (est. 2022), a collective cultivating space for QTBIPOC artists to grow, be platformed, be compensated, and be held. Community is part of my practice. Care is part of my practice. My work is not separate from the world… it is in conversation with it.

I create to remember.
I create to be seen.
I create so others might find themselves reflected: dreamy, messy, divine.

LUYA