ARTISTS TO KNOW: PATRICIA ENCARNACIÓN
Photography: Avery Savage; Creative Direction & Production: Bianca Jean-Pierre & Avery Savage
There are certain projects that don’t just speak to identity but ask us to feel through its politics. Patricia Encarnación’s Tropical Limerence, part of The Shed’s Open Call: Portals exhibition (on view through August 24), is one of them. Across ceramic forms, layered video essays, and filmed testimonies, the installation asks us to confront how colonial desire continues to shape how Global Majority communities are seen, consumed, and misinterpreted. Through conversations held in the Dominican Republic, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Barcelona, and New York City, Encarnación creates an embodied archive that blurs the lines between artwork and altar, vulnerability and theory, fracture and sovereignty.
Rooted in the writings of Dorothy Tennov, bell hooks, and Lorgia García Peña, Tropical Limerence reframes obsessive longing not as romantic, but as a mechanism of domination. In our conversation, Encarnación shares how these literary frameworks coincide with her material choices, the sacred weight of testimony, and the ways ceramics carry memory, resistance, and care. This interview is a reminder that love, when grounded in justice and self-definition, can become a strategy for survival, a portal for healing, and a practice of radical reimagining.
Patricia Encarnación interviewed by Bianca Jean-Pierre and photographed by Avery Savage for SHEER.
Bianca Jean-Pierre: Tropical Limerence reframes desire as a colonial impulse, interrogating how Global Majority bodies and cultures are idealized, consumed, and distorted through the gaze of the Global North. What moment or memory first planted the seed for this concept in your practice?
Patricia Encarnación: I could say the seed was planted during my early years when I started traveling and when I began to notice how people responded to my accent, my body, or my origin, not with curiosity, but with projection. There was a dissonance between how I understood myself and how others imagined me. Over time, I came to recognize that this wasn’t personal, it was structural. That realization became a lens: stereotypes are not neutral. In the Global North, it is often a vehicle of domination, projection, and fetish. Tropical Limerence emerged from the need to name that impulse and confront it.
The Global North has long assumed the authority to define and distort the Global Majority, imposing racialized, gendered, and cultural stigmas that position us as uncivilized or underdeveloped. This framing shaped the questions I began asking early on: Who gets to define value? Who is rendered desirable, legible, or worthy? In my search to understand love, how we relate, yearn, and project, I came across Dorothy Tennov’s notion of limerence. Her term helped name a pattern I had sensed but not yet articulated: the obsessive, idealizing gaze that mirrors colonial desire. One night during the early stages of the research, I dreamt I was tied to a chair while a male figure cast my hands and feet in ceramic, turning them into a flower vessel. I woke up with a visceral sense of impotence—and clarity. That was limerence. But if I reclaimed that image, if I turned the casting of my body into a monument, I could rewrite the narrative. That dream became the seed of this project.
“There was a dissonance between how I understood myself and how others imagined me. Over time, I came to recognize that this wasn’t personal, it was structural. That realization became a lens: stereotypes are not neutral. In the Global North, it is often a vehicle of domination, projection, and fetish.”
Bianca: In each chapter of Tropical Limerence, you cultivate space for intimate testimony across geographies, from Martinique to the Dominican Republic to New York City. How do you approach building trust across these sites, and how do the ceramics function as vessels for that emotional and political weight?
Patricia: I establish trust through attentive, accountable listening. I never adopt an anthropological gaze; I enter each space with the intention to truly listen and the desire to understand its histories, its people, and what binds us together. Rather than conducting interviews, I engage in shared experiences. The questions touch on bodies as territories, love, our relationships with the “empire”, and longing are designed to hold space, not to direct it, aiming to invite participants into a collaborative and vulnerable conversation.
The ceramics then become both archive and altar. Each form is molded by the textures of what’s been said, felt, mourned, or hoped for. Clay’s own memory and fragility mirror the emotional weight of these dialogues: the cracks, imprints, and joins record traces of collective testimony, transforming fleeting words into lasting, political monuments.
“Who gets to define value? Who is rendered desirable, legible, or worthy? In my search to understand love, how we relate, yearn, and project, I came across Dorothy Tennov’s notion of limerence. Her term helped name a pattern I had sensed but not yet articulated: the obsessive, idealizing gaze that mirrors colonial desire.”
Bianca: You’ve cited Dorothy Tennov, Bell Hooks, and Lorgia García Peña as key texts shaping this project. How does literary theory and research, particularly around love, limerance, liminality, and Blackness in the Caribbean ground and expand your visual practice?
Patricia: Theory gives me language, but more than that, it gives me grounding. These thinkers are not simply citations; they are co-conspirators in how I understand form, memory, and power.
Dorothy Tennov’s concept of limerence, when reframed, became a lens through which I could examine colonial desire—how the Global South is fetishized, romanticized, and consumed by the Global North. Her language helped me name that gaze and rework it.
Bell Hooks taught me that love is political. Love, in her writing, becomes an act of justice, of radical presence. Her work guides how I frame intimacy not as vulnerability alone, but as a tool for collective transformation.
Lorgia García Peña’s Translating Blackness reminds me that erasure is a form of violence, and that refusal is a form of love. Her use of translation, not just as a linguistic movement but as a metaphor for how Blackness circulates across borders, directly informs how I move between testimony, image, and clay. She offers a blueprint for making the invisible visible without falling into spectacle. Her framing of knowledge-making from the margins resonates deeply with the Global Majority conversations I hold across sites.
Together, these thinkers scaffold my practice. They give me the foundation to see ceramics not just as material, but as theory in form: a crack can be a rupture in empire, an imprint can carry ancestral knowledge, and a vessel can hold the weight of a refusal.
“bell hooks taught me that love is political. Love, in her writing, becomes an act of justice, of radical presence. Her work guides how I frame intimacy not as vulnerability alone, but as a tool for collective transformation.”
Bianca: Tropical Limerance sits at the intersection of video, sculpture, and memory, anchoring the ephemeral through tactile forms. What drew you to ceramics as a counterpoint to video, and what possibilities do you see in that material tension?
Patricia: Video is temporal—it moves, it fades, it passes. Ceramics resist that. They hold stillness and weight. That contrast creates a productive tension. I was drawn to ceramics not just as a medium, but as a methodology. Working with clay demands patience, humility, and care—qualities that mirror the kinds of testimonies shared in Tropical Limerence. It’s not just about representing memory, it’s about embodying it.
“Lorgia García Peña’s Translating Blackness reminds me that erasure is a form of violence, and that refusal is a form of love. Her use of translation, not just as a linguistic movement but as a metaphor for how Blackness circulates across borders, directly informs how I move between testimony, image, and clay.”
Bianca: Much of your work resists the flattening of Caribbean identity into something tropicalized or easily consumable. How do you navigate that tension as both an artist and scholar, especially within an art world that often romanticizes or extracts from the very communities it claims to support?
Patricia: I’ve always heard the Caribbean described as a paradise, but if you ask people from the region, many will echo that phrase with irony or resistance. Historically, the idea of “paradise” wasn’t born within; it was imagined by the Global North and imposed upon us. It’s a limerent fantasy: an exotic, tropicalized projection that erases our complexity, our struggle, our agency. So I constantly ask: Paradise for whom? Constructed by whom? And at whose expense, physically and spiritually?
To resist that flattening, I stay close to the land, its people, and its unbiased histories. That’s my first form of accountability. I also refuse assimilation. I’m not interested in being made legible to dominant establishments if it requires distorting what I know to be true. That doesn’t mean I avoid those spaces; I enter them critically, and always negotiate.
As both artist and scholar, I try to build containers, ceramic, conceptual, curatorial, that can hold contradictions. I don’t aim to explain the Caribbean to outsiders. I aim to center Caribbean epistemologies, history, and ways of knowing that don’t require translation. I want my work to live in tension, not resolution, because that’s where truth and authenticity often reside.
“I was drawn to ceramics not just as a medium, but as a methodology. Working with clay demands patience, humility, and care—qualities that mirror the kinds of testimonies shared in Tropical Limerence. It’s not just about representing memory, it’s about embodying it.”
Bianca: As a feminized immigrant of color, your creative approach often folds your own story into the work. What role does personal vulnerability play in your practice, and how do you protect your spirit while offering so much?
Patricia: Lately, I’ve come to understand that vulnerability isn’t just present in my work; it is a methodology. In a world that reads vulnerability as weakness or overexposure, I’ve chosen to see it as a form of discernment. It’s a powerful filter: it repels those who aren’t aligned with my frequency or intentions. That can come at a cost, but it’s a price I’ve been willing to pay.
If I ask others to share intimate parts of themselves, I must be willing to meet them in that space. But vulnerability doesn’t mean giving everything away—it means being honest, present, and committed to mutual care. It requires boundaries, not walls.
I protect my spirit by staying rooted in community, by moving at a pace that honors my nervous system, and by challenging the Western drive toward constant productivity. I let softness lead. I’ve stopped trying to separate the personal from the political; they are one current. My practice flows from that current, and it continues to nourish the vast needs of my integrity and purpose.
“Historically, the idea of ‘paradise’ wasn’t born within; it was imagined by the Global North and imposed upon us. It’s a limerent fantasy: an exotic, tropicalized projection that erases our complexity, our struggle, our agency. So I constantly ask: Paradise for whom? Constructed by whom? And at whose expense, physically and spiritually?”
Bianca: Open Call: Portals invites artists to open thresholds for transformation and resistance. How does Tropical Limerence act as a portal for you, and what kind of passage do you hope it offers viewers?
Patricia: When I first heard the exhibition title Portals, I felt a resonance, because Tropical Limerence is, at its core, a threshold. It gathers vulnerable stories and interwoven knowledges, foregrounding how Global Majority communities understand themselves, their lands, and their origins. Each testimony reveals an inner cosmos of dignity, resistance, and love, inviting visitors, many of whom arrive not even knowing what “limerence” means, into a shared space of curiosity and learning. For me, the project opens a passage into examining how love and its distortions operate both personally and structurally, confronting imaginaries shaped by empire and asking how we might imagine otherwise. It carries me toward ancestral memory and the quiet gestures of refusal to assimilation that have always existed in our communities.
For viewers, I hope the work dislocates the habitual “the otherness” gaze, turning these shared stories into deeper awareness, and reimagines love as a political force where listening itself becomes an act of resistance and care becomes a strategy for liberation. If Tropical Limerence can move even one person from passive spectatorship to active, ethical witnessing, the portal will have served its purpose.
“I don’t aim to explain the Caribbean to outsiders. I aim to center Caribbean epistemologies, history, and ways of knowing that don’t require translation. I want my work to live in tension, not resolution, because that’s where truth and authenticity often reside.”
Bianca: You’ve moved fluidly across curating, academic research, and international exhibitions. What future mediums are calling to you now, and how do you hope your work continues to reshape conversations around Caribbean identity and reclaiming narratives?
Patricia: I’m increasingly drawn to nature and to material culture as the quotidian. In the epigenetic inscriptions carried in our bodies, in the healing whispered through oral traditions that rescue what is truly necessary. I want to work more with ethics and human dignity, with earth and with scent, those elemental provocations that awaken a form of humanity slipping from view in these times. I’m also imagining communal forms, ritual, gathering, shared meals, as living mediums, practices that convene us in reciprocity rather than display.
My hope is that this work continues to unsettle the dominant gaze and shift the center of gravity. I don’t seek simply to mirror colonial narratives; I aim to build others, narratives thick with memory, humor, resistance, and life. The Global Majority, and especially the Caribbean, is not a backdrop or mere gateway; it is a thinking place, a living archive. We, its children, are its narrators, not its symbols.
