Esther Mirabel

Lives and works in France

Artist statement

I am an artist and trained architect working at the intersection of sensitive cartography, material process, and urban research. My practice translates the lived, emotional experience of a place — what classical maps cannot show — into textured, burned, and stitched surfaces, in dialogue with the harder data that actually shapes a territory's future: elevation, flood risk, property value, displacement. My ongoing series, Cutis Urbana, treats each canvas as skin stretched over a specific Miami neighborhood. Taut thread traces the objective, almost architectural forces at work — capital, risk, measured elevation — while controlled burning and raw matter register rupture, memory, and repair. Each tondo removes any fixed orientation, echoing a central fact of climate gentrification in Miami: neighborhoods once overlooked because they sat on higher ground are now the ones being fought over as sea levels rise. The first three works in the series were developed following research and fieldwork in Miami as part of a Villa Albertine residency. I am currently expanding Cutis Urbana into a broader body of work, extending the same method to other places I have lived in or studied closely.

Artwork