Ana González speaks with Samaira Wilson about her solo show RÍO at Sean Kelly Gallery. González discusses the necessity of the natural world in her practice, and her collaboration with Cartier and the Amazon Conservation Team.
Last month, Ana González opened her third exhibition with Sean Kelly Gallery. The show, titled RÍO— Spanish for river– frames the exhibition as an expedition through forests, jungles, and waterfalls. González compares rivers to blood within the body, circulating life through the forest. Central to her practice is a longstanding relationship with Indigenous communities in the Amazon, living and working alongside them has shaped her understanding of nature as a living entity rather than a resource.
For over two decades González has worked in partnership with Indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon. In collaboration with Cartier and the Amazon Conservation Team, she helped realize the UASC Uancia Health Center, serving 19 communities across Putumayo, Caquetá, and Amazonas, where access to care depends entirely on river transport. To support this initiative, González presents Amazonian Thinker Stools, handmade by Yolima’s Indigenous artisans in Leticia from Chonta Palm (Macana). Proceeds fund a boat to transport essential medical supplies, extending the reach of the health centre along the river.
In RÍO, González’s porcelain sculptures, textiles, and paintings oscillate between vitality and dissolution, evoking both the region’s fertility and vulnerability. Her use of green hues evokes the forest’s abundance while recalling the colour of currency, pointing to the tension between ecological wealth and economic exploitation. A new video work takes viewers through the Amazon by boat, capturing the dense vegetation, sounds of birds, and streams. Accompanied by travel journals, sketches, and sculptures displayed in a vitrine, these combined elements peel back the process behind González’s work.
Samaira Wilson: What gets you out of bed in the morning?
Ana González: Oh, good question. One of the things that speaks to my soul, not my mind—I prefer to connect with my soul first—is my studio. Not just the work itself, but the happiness and safety I feel when I’m surrounded by all of my things and this connection I have with what I do. I also love the very first interaction I have in the morning, which is with the birds I hear outside my window.
SW: Do you always hear them?
AG: Yeah, I always hear the birds at 5 AM. Even if I’m in a city, I hear the morning song of the birds. That reminds me of where I am and of my connection to nature. That is important to me, to have some kind of nature surrounding me when I’m waking up. Or when I go to bed, the sound of the, how do you say, the chicharras?
SW: The cicadas!
AG: Cicadas. Yeah. I love them!
SW: What personal beliefs and values do you have that bleed into your work? As in, where do you begin from often? Are there any principles that you stand by in relation to your practice?
AG: I’ve been very connected with nature since I was a little kid. I didn’t discover it, because for as long as I can remember, I have always felt it was part of me. I’ve always known this is what I want to talk about. After working with communities in nature in my country and across South America, I felt that connection could not be lost. Since coming to New York it has been a challenge to stay connected to my roots, to the earth. But it is necessary for me to remain true to myself. It comes at a high cost as a woman, as a Latin American artist, and as a mother. I’ve had to fight many battles, and being true to myself has not always been comfortable for those around me. There are countless struggles to face, and the challenge is knowing which are worth winning and which are not. It means understanding my voice and showing it to the world.
SW: Yeah, that’s interesting, because as artists we’re all trying to figure out why we want our work to exist, what we want our work to exist for, or what we want it to be in service to—it’s a big task. In RÍO, you have all of these different mediums: porcelain sculpture, video work, and the field notes in between. What do you feel one medium can express that another can’t?
AG: It’s a good question because each material has its own soul. Porcelain is about fragility, but also the history of porcelain is a history of beauty. It’s hard to work with porcelain, it’s so fragile. The textiles show the beauty of the landscapes I travel through, the landscapes that are still there, but we don’t know for how long. They’re an easy way for me to show how they are disappearing. There’s this phrase by Humboldt, that nature is like a big tapestry, and if you pull out a thread, something happens to the entire textile; it’s a living system. I think it’s very important to connect in a very simple way with the viewers who are looking at your art, not in a complicated way. I don’t want to be complicated. Drawing was my first medium; it was the first thing I did in my lap. Painting came second. For me to understand everything, I always draw it first. Even though I can paint in a very realistic or perfect way, I don’t like perfection, or realism in my painting practice. What I want in my paintings, most of them, are different layers. There are so many layers in life, and in nature, and in everything that is slowly disappearing. Nature is slowly fading from our planet, and that fading has a phantasmagoric quality to it that I try and capture in my paintings.
SW: Yes, and in some of the paintings, it’s foggy. It’s almost like I can feel the air, like I’ve woken up early in the morning and gone outside as the sun is rising. For the textile works, you’re engaging with the fabric history by weaving, unraveling, and deteriorating the image. When it becomes undone, it’s like when a tree loses its leaves, it becomes just a skeleton. The medium and the message are kind of holding hands. It’s a harsh reality, touching something soft. Two things are true, but it’s delivered to us in a way that doesn’t feel horrific, even though it is.
AG: Exactly.
SW: It’s a very subtle pressure. How do you prepare before you begin painting?
AG: It’s a very important part of the work. But it’s more than just brainstorming, it would be more like ‘soul-storming’, because I don’t believe that we are only our thoughts. As a woman, I’m very connected to my intuition. Beauty itself is very important to me, and I worry that as a society we have lost connection to it. Society is a better when it’s surrounded by beauty. I connect with these ideas when I am in the woods, or in the Amazon. For example, when I go into the forest and there’s a fog in the morning. I really need people to understand how this works. How this is the beginning of a river, this fog then turns into water. It’s a whole cycle. This is where every piece of work begins.
SW: Yes. Yes. One of my professors once said, the gift is that you can feel all of this, and you’re just trying to give that gift to other people.
AG: Exactly.
SW: The dangling porcelain orchids in the show feel like you’re crystallising them. They’re ephemeral; they won’t last forever. But now, they live on. I heard there’s a story between the bee and the orchid. Is there a specific relationship that nurtures their ecosystem?
AG: It’s true. It’s one of my favourite stories because a friend of mine is a scientist, and he studied mutualism for more than twelve years. Mutualism between species is rare, but some of these relationships are incredible, and a few happen in the tropics. I saw him on Instagram with orchids in his backyard in Colombia, and I asked what he was doing with them. He explained that he was investigating the mutualism between a bee called Euglossa and an orchid called Gongora, which have been in a relationship for more than twenty million years. I said, “Oh my God, twenty million years, that’s a lot!” He said it’s one of the oldest relationships on Earth.
I then met with biologists and scientists at the University of Los Andes in Colombia, and we applied for a grant called the Packard Prize, which he, as a scientist, won. I found it so romantic, the bee finding the orchid’s perfume, her scent, through the flower. These Gongora orchids need the pollen the bee carries, so when the bee visits the orchid, it is participating in a process refined over millions of years. It’s such a specialised, intimate relationship that has lasted so long.
SW: That’s how we wish to be, right? We want our relationship with nature to be mutual and not so extracting and ruining.
AG: Yeah, it’s the opposite of us. There are very violent agents, like deforestation, gold mining, fracking, and drilling. These are aggressive processes that are not mutualistic. The bee and the orchid are the exact opposite of predators. They represent an equilibrium between two species. I find it so beautiful to have this example in nature, and it is being lost because of deforestation. Soon, we may no longer see these kinds of interactions between species.
SW: Regarding Cartier and the UASC Uancia Health Center, how did Cartier come into the picture for you?
AG: I really don’t know how they chose me, but it was beautiful. They said they wanted one porcelain piece, and the way they would pay would also go toward a foundation. I found that really interesting, because part of my work is with communities in protected areas.
Then I asked, “What do they need?” I always start with what the community actually needs, not what I feel I should give. And what they really need is to be left alone. But now, with climate change, the rivers are drying, the Amazon is dry for longer periods than before, and more diseases and viruses are emerging. They need health centres that combine traditional medicine with Western medicine.
That’s how I asked Cartier to be involved. Thanks to them, we built the UASC Uancia Health Center in the Amazon, which is caring for the communities now. As we speak, they’re running brigades for children with heart diseases, raising funds from hospitals in the cities to bring care to the Amazon.
They asked me which foundation, and I’ve been working for many years with the Amazon Conservation Team, which operates in multiple countries. In Colombia, they’ve done a lot of work with the communities that are the keepers of the Amazon and the rainforest. I’ve seen what they’ve accomplished, and I said, “Okay, this is the one.”
SW: Wow.
AG: Maybe we cannot make a huge difference, because the world demands so much extraction, gold mining, and other resource exploitation—but we can make small interventions to help prevent further damage.
SW: Absolutely, and then the thinker stools come into play. I heard the proceeds would go towards getting a boat to take people across the river to the health centre. Who made the thinker stools?
AG: Actually, the communities always have thinkers’ stools. This is very common in Amazonian communities, where the thinkers sit to talk all night, drinking jahe or chewing coca leaves. They gather in their malocas, their huts, and these stools are central to the conversations. Each stool is amazing and unique, varying from community to community. On one of my last trips to the Amazon, I found a beautiful stool made from fallen trees. It was a dark wood, and I thought it was fantastic. I said, “This is a work of art.” When they told me they needed a boat to bring everyone to the health center, which is deep in the jungle, I realized we could sell the stools to raise the money for the boat. That is how we are making it happen.
SW: That’s awesome. I feel like this leads naturally into how one combines activism and artistry. It’s not about exploiting the situation for yourself; you’re raising awareness and giving back to what inspired your vision in the first place. It’s like a circle.
AG: Yeah, it is, and this is one of the principles we were talking about. The principle is that you cannot take all this knowledge from them. I gained it by talking with them and being in their communities. If you don’t give something back, it’s not fair. You don’t have to do it my way, but I always find a way.
For the Sean Kelly exhibition in Los Angeles, we collaborated with another community of women who do embroidery. They needed palm leaves for ceilings, so we brought the palm leaves to them. For working with wool textiles, we bought them sheep so they would have the material to continue making their work. That is how I help. It is a very small way to contribute, but at least it gives something back to them.
SW: Yes, 100%. How has the support of Sean Kelly nurtured your growth and solidified things for you?
AG: It has been incredible, because it’s one thing to work in Colombia and be part of the local scene, but to come here and work with Sean Kelly has changed the way I see myself and my work. They see me in a way that I don’t see myself. I was an artist working with communities, going to these protected, often violent areas where there is coca and gorillas and everything, that was my everyday scene. But when they see me, I realize how people are not aware of where we come from. We all come from nature, from that connection. For me, it was like, wow, I have a voice, and I can show how things are.
SW: It’s cool to be seen. It’s like they get to mirror something back to you.
AG: It’s also about trust. Sean Kelly trusted me, and that trust gave me a sense of power in myself to keep exploring the areas I felt I needed to explore, even when I didn’t have the courage. It gave me more energy.
