Patricia Domínguez

Patricia Domínguez (b. 1984, Santiago, Chile) lives and works in Puchuncaví, Chile. Through a wide range of media, including watercolour, ceramics, sculptural assemblage, and video installation, her practice brings together myths, symbols, rituals, and healing practices with experimental research into ethnobotany. Her works often take the form of shrine-like environments, drawing on a visual vocabulary that moves between plant life, consumer goods, corporate wellness, digital technologies, and spiritual practices. Across these different registers, Domínguez investigates relationships between living species and the ways in which contemporary forms of technology, commerce, and extraction shape our understanding of the natural world. Her practice combines artistic imagination with forms of research rooted in ethnobotany, healing traditions, and questions of interconnection. Plant knowledge and multispecies relationships are brought into dialogue with digital and scientific imaginaries, creating works in which spiritual and technological systems coexist. Her research has also addressed extractivism, cultural appropriation, and the destruction of natural heritage, while maintaining an interest in forms of knowledge that exist beyond conventional scientific frameworks. Domínguez’s interdisciplinary approach is reflected in her education and research. She studied at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile before completing an MFA in Studio Art at Hunter College, New York, in 2013, and a Botanical and Natural Science Illustration Certificate at the New York Botanical Garden in 2011. She has also undertaken research and residencies connecting artistic practice with scientific inquiry, including the Simetría programme at CERN, conducted in collaboration with the European Southern Observatory and the ALMA observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Her research at CERN engaged with quantum physics, non-locality, and entanglement, while her wider ethnobotanical investigations have included time spent in Peru learning from a plant healer and studying beliefs concerning interconnection and multispecies relations. In 2015, Domínguez founded Studio Vegetalista, an experimental platform for ethnobotanical research based in Chile. The platform extends her interest in the intersection of art, plant knowledge, healing practices, and alternative systems of knowledge, and has become an important part of her artistic and educational practice. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions and exhibitions including the New Museum in New York, the Wellcome Collection in London, Gasworks in London, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Gwangju Biennale, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and CentroCentro in Madrid, and the MUNCH Triennale in Oslo. In 2024, her video work *Three Moons Below* premiered as part of a project developed through her Simetría research, and the work was subsequently presented at Centro Botín in Santander. Domínguez received the Simetría Residency Award through CERN and its partners and was awarded the Fundación Botín Visual Arts Grant in 2022.