Maru Aponte

Lives and works in Houston, TX, USA

Artist statement

My research explores the ecological, cultural, and psychological dimensions of water. Through color and light as phenomenological tools, I reframe the landscape in relation to my migratory experience and Puerto Rican identity. My paintings expand traditional notions of watercolor, embracing its fluidity to investigate the physicality of memory. Often working at large scale, I create pieces that allow viewers to walk around memory as if it were spatial terrain. I work between Houston, Canada, and Puerto Rico, beginning with watercolor sketches made en plein air on the island of Puerto Rico and carrying them across borders and oceans to develop final works in the studio. This process allows me to move between presence and distance, between what is remembered and what is reconstructed. The resulting works invite viewers to encounter watercolor on canvas and large format folded paper forms that function simultaneously as background, architecture, and gesture. These folds disrupt perspective, allowing multiple views of the landscape to coexist—at once simultaneous and disproportionate. They shift how one moves around the painting, echoing the difference between inhabiting a place and arriving as a visitor. Their portability turns memory into something that can be carried. In The Sea is a House (2025), developed during my residency at the Art Gallery of Ontario, I expanded my material research through paper-making and community engagement. While memory is sensorial, abstract,...

Artwork