Teresita Leal - Textile Artist

I longed to feel the immediacy of results, a quality I had always envied in the painter’s process.

I longed to feel the immediacy of results, a quality I had always envied in the painter’s process.

Combining the joy of free expression with the soothing, meditative rhythm of stitching.

I explore the expressiveness of colour and gesture through textile collage. By layering fabrics, I seek to create compositions making colour and value the protagonists. Each fragment of fabric, with its texture and hue, becomes a brushstroke that contributes to an abstract visual narrative, where intuition guides the creative process.

I explore the expressiveness of colour and gesture through textile collage. By layering fabrics, I seek to create compositions making colour and value the protagonists. Each fragment of fabric, with its texture and hue, becomes a brushstroke that contributes to an abstract visual narrative, where intuition guides the creative process.

I explore the expressiveness of colour and gesture through textile collage. By layering fabrics, I seek to create compositions making colour and value the protagonists. Each fragment of fabric, with its texture and hue, becomes a brushstroke that contributes to an abstract visual narrative, where intuition guides the creative process.

This unexpected recognition felt like a quiet return, an intuitive way of reconnecting with the past through the act of making, bridging the space between.

Cycles trilogy - Together, these pieces invite viewers to look deeper—beyond the surface—to appreciate the underlying cycles that define our world.

In the final piece of the series, Light – Day and Night, I explore the dynamic cycle of light. This textile collage reflects the interplay between sunlight and moonlight through thoughtful variations in color and value, presenting a visual contrast between the warmth of day and the coolness of night.

Integrating Tryptic

Symbols explores cultural iconography, where I weave together the sun—an emblem of power, energy, and spirituality—with native designs that speak to ancestral wisdom and artistic continuity.

Jungle captures the untamed vitality of the natural world, echoing the surreal and mystical qualities often found in Latin American artistic interpretations of nature.

Village: I depicted a characteristic rural Latin American village, reimagined through a cubist lens.

In this new piece in the series, I will talk to the earth about the cycle of water in a monochrome blue palette. I suggest falling water and ascending vapor in a textile collage representation. As in Seasons, I worked mostly with hand-dyed and commercial fabric scraps

Seasons is the first piece, I worked mostly with hand-dyed and commercial leftover fabric scraps.

Textile collage made with hand-dyed and commercial cotton fabrics, machine-stitched

I have depicted what I believe to be the various aspects of our way to Ithaka. This final piece represents home, arriving in the autumn garden after swift voyages, rugged mountains, and green valleys.