Photo by Sandy Lankford
Didi Garza is a Houston-based artist who works across media to think about the intersections between bioscience and art. Through cyanotype, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and installation, she imagines an inner biological coherence and quiet, dream-like state. The work suggests that humans are physiologically, emotionally, and spiritually interconnected. With a nod to surrealism, she represents invisible forces as light and dark, presence and absence, image and shadow, consciousness and unconsciousness, or divine and physical. Many works hint at cellular or molecular imagery, investigating systems of interconnections, undulations, furrows, protrusions, and muscular or lobular forms. Using a modified cyanotype process in novel ways (as the background, with pastel drawings under- or overlayed, as collaged pieces, or as paint itself), Garza's works draw from the mysterious shadows of radiographic techniques. For her, the water-based cyanotype medium, with its deep blue color and small crystalline formations signifies the central role water plays in our biological and chemical beings. The shades of cyanotype blue encompass various symbolic meanings for the artist, including divine connotations (heaven, God’s power) and nature (sky, water); medical research shows the color's positive effects on the mind and body. Through this work, she plumbs quiet contemplation, reflection, healing, and strangeness.