Gabriella Raquel Jacobo Bowman

My practice centers the body as a site of collision and ritual. I use fashion, performance, sculpture, and material experimentation to give form to spirituality and lived tension. Rather than seeking harmony or resolution, I stay with contradiction, allowing softness and aggression to exist at once.

Growing up in a religious community, I developed a deep connection to my faith that nurtured my empathy and kindness. However I learned to associate divinity with whiteness and absence. The iconography meant to offer comfort never reflected my identity or my history. Over time, my work has moved beyond representation alone and toward embodiment. I no longer ask to be seen within inherited symbols, instead, I place my own body at the center, transforming it into an altar, a site of creation.

As a Caribbean and African-American artist, my work is shaped by hybridity, diaspora, and effects of colonialism. Mixed identity is often consumed as aesthetic and flattened while denied space to exist fully. I am interested in what happens when discomfort is not avoided, but tended to long enough for transformation to occur.

Fashion functions as both armor and spectacle within my work, drawing from historical religious aesthetics while refusing exclusion. Fashion allows me to merge sculpture and theatrical influences to spark dialogue. I am interested in how adornment can signify devotion, dominance, softness, and threat simultaneously. Femininity in my practice is not passive, it contains weight and tension.

Performance is central to my practice because it moves beyond language, allowing me to engage the body as a living archive. I take control of my body, deciding when I am seen and how, while also releasing restrictions placed onto it.

At its core, my work is an offering to those who recognize themselves within these contradictions, and a challenge to those who seek to consume without holding. I do not aim to resolve duality, but to perform it until it presses back. Through my practice, I carve space for bodies that exist in-between, insisting that divinity, power, and tenderness can be unapologetically lived.