A practice rooted in personal transformation
This week we welcome Teresa Olds, a multidisciplinary artist born in Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico, now based in New York City. She holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts with a minor in art history from Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla., and a master’s degreein fine arts from Parsons School of Design. Rooted in her Mexican heritage and informed by spiritual practice, Olds’ work blends inner experience with outer reality. Known for her vibrant palette and layered compositions, her work collapses boundaries between the visible and unseen, offering encounters with thresholds of change. Olds’ work has been exhibited in Florida, New York City and Mexico.
Olds says: “My work navigates the interplay between vulnerability, the surreal and the complex journey of healing. Rooted in my lived experience as a young woman, I create dreamlike spaces where reality and fantasy merge. Through my art, I examine the tension between belonging and alienation, exploring how trauma, love and the secrets we carry shape our inner landscapes.
“Vulnerability is foundational to my practice and I am drawn to the question of what it means to be truly seen, by both ourselves and others. While this exposure can be uncomfortable, I believe it has the power to connect and heal. These works are born from moments of profound change: from surviving cancer to undergoing a transformative spiritual retreat in Mexico and navigating the loss of my father.
“My practice is an act of radical honesty, reclaiming hidden parts of myself and offering spaces for communion with the unseen. At the heart of my process is also personal mythology: reframing lived experiences, even painful ones, through a mythic lens that transforms them into narrative cycles of meaning, renewal and growth. This reframing allows me to process trauma as part of an ongoing journey, expanding beyond the rigid, Western frameworks of the systems we inherit.
