Sofía del Mar Collins: Daughters who descend with the streams (Hijas que descienden con los torrentes) — Sofía del Mar Collins

Chozick Family Art Gallery is pleased to announce Daughters who descend with the streams (Hijas que descienden con los torrentes), Puerto Rican artist Sofía del Mar Collins’ first solo exhibition with the gallery. This presentation introduces a new body of paintings and works on paper accompanied by suspended textile sculptures, expanding Collins' ongoing investigation into landscape, mythology, and the material histories embedded within the waters of the Caribbean.

Working through an alchemical process of extracting botanical pigments from flowers and compost to hand-dye silk before painting, Collins approaches each work as a site of transformation. She considers the gradual interaction between pigment and textile an extension of painting itself, embracing the slow transitions through which color stains, settles, and shifts across the surface. Guided by the sequential operations of Renaissance alchemy—calcination, dissolution, separation, sublimation, conjunction, mortification, coagulation, fermentation, and distillation—her work unfolds through processes of dissolution and renewal. The material evolution of each work mirrors its conceptual concerns, where geology, memory, and myth are understood not as fixed conditions but as states of perpetual becoming.

This attention to transformation is rooted in Collins' study of Puerto Rico's diverse aquatic ecologies. Wetlands, springs, rivers, mangroves, coral reefs, and the surrounding sea function as liminal spaces between earth and water, life and death, permanence and change. Places where organic matter decomposes into fertile ground become models for regeneration, providing both the conceptual and material foundation from which her imagery emerges.

At the center of this new series are water deities and hybrid feminine figures—mermaids, sirens, and nymphs—reimagined within the ecological and cultural landscapes of the contemporary Caribbean. Collins traces these archetypes across European, African, Indigenous, and Caribbean cosmologies, considering how they have traveled and transformed through centuries of migration and cultural exchange. Rather than presenting them as relics of folklore, she imagines these figures as living presences whose identities continue to evolve.

An important precursor to these figures appears in Scylla (2026), a painting that developed from Collins' ongoing engagement with the typography of medieval illuminated manuscripts. The work takes its title from the Greek mythological female sea creature whose serpentine, multi-tailed body and dog-headed forms contributed to the literary development of the modern Western mermaid figure—one among a multitude of water deities found across cultures. In the painting, the letter "S" becomes both image and language, a serpentine form that simultaneously initiates the name Scylla. Language itself becomes fluid, its signs carrying histories while continually generating new associations. Scylla thus anticipates the figures that populate Collins' new paintings, establishing a lineage between language, mythology, and the mutable bodies that move through her aquatic worlds.

"I am interested in what a Caribbean mermaid is today, and what her role might be," Collins reflects. "These figures carry influences from many lineages and continue to exist among us. They speak to autonomy, freedom, protection of the land, and the ways bodies, identities, and histories remain fluid.”

The exhibition draws inspiration from the sixteenth-century alchemist Paracelsus, who described water nymphs, or undines, as sacred custodians of the world's waters. Collins considers distinct archetypes—spring, river, and oceanic nymphs—and recontextualizes them within the contemporary waters of Puerto Rico. They inhabit an interconnected cartographic universe of subterranean aquifers, freshwater springs, rivers, mangrove forests, coral reefs, and sea, where mythology, ecology, and lived experience converge. Increasingly threatened by environmental degradation, unchecked development, and aging infrastructure, these fragile hydrological systems become both the setting for and subject of the work.

Her paintings emerge from sustained research into the geological history of Puerto Rico's northern karst region, where rainwater has carved vast cave systems beneath limestone over millions of years. This gradual erosion becomes both metaphor and method. Working en plein air, Collins allows rain, humidity, and the surrounding environment to participate directly in the making of the paintings, surrendering portions of the image to the autonomous movement of water. Purples, pinks, reds, blues, greens, and browns bleed, fuse, and dissolve into passages that evoke coral reefs, submerged caverns, sediment, and flowing water before gradually revealing bodies inhabiting springs, emerging from rivers, surfacing from the sea, or materializing from stone. As Collins describes it, "the figures emerge out of the abstraction.”

These environments also evoke what literary scholar Jason Marc Harris describes as Caribbean waters functioning simultaneously "as a site of cultural transmission and as a site of anxiety about invasion." Collins imagines mermaids, sirens, and water nymphs moving through interconnected waterways, carrying histories of forced and voluntary migration that have shaped the region. Their territories are defined not by fixed geography but by fluid networks of movement, memory, and exchange.

Drawing on the writing of Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown, Collins further considers these figures through a lens of "fluid feminine self-possession." Neither entirely human nor entirely other, they become mutable symbols through which questions of gender, sexuality, ecology, spirituality, and embodiment can be reconsidered. Like the ecosystems they inhabit, their hybrid bodies resist fixed categories, embracing transformation, multiplicity, and renewal.

The works presented at The Armory Show and Chozick Family Art Gallery mark an important evolution in Collins' practice. While her earlier paintings explored atmospheric abstraction and botanical transformation, this new body of work introduces mythological inhabitants that transform the landscape into a living ecology. Spring, river, and oceanic nymphs, mermaids, and sirens populate a shared universe in which myth becomes inseparable from environmental stewardship and the protection of increasingly vulnerable ecosystems.

Extending this universe beyond the painted surface, Collins presents The unraveling that explains me things (La desenmaraña que me explica las cosas) (2026), a suspended textile sculpture composed of dyed linen and cotton threads and wool. Measuring approximately ten feet in length, with dimensions that vary according to its installation, the work belongs to an ongoing series of woven sculptures that considers how asymmetrical parts might sustain a larger structure. Knots, openings, splits, patchings, and crossings create metaphorical entanglements in which autonomy emerges through a fragile set of imperfect relations. Its cascading forms evoke aquatic vegetation, fishing nets, root systems, and currents, creating a spatial counterpart to the hydrological networks that animate the paintings.

A selection of works on paper reveals the intimate geometric and linear investigations underlying Collins' larger compositions. Together, the paintings, sculpture, and works on paper extend her exploration of water across multiple scales and dimensions—as material and metaphor, a repository of memory, and an agent of transformation.

Collins' contemporary water deities emerge as custodians of threatened landscapes while embodying the enduring capacity of myth to evolve alongside the cultures, ecologies, and material processes that continually reshape it.