This interview was conducted by Hadeel Boufarhat on July 22, 2026 at a pool party celebrating the exhibition, Radical Kinship, at the Feminist Center for Creative work. It was a fantastic pool party, and was hosted by the curator, Chloë Flores. Corazón del Sol had prepared and cooked food, and Emily Marchand had mixed cocktails and mocktails for the party. By the time Hadeel had gotten around to actually doing the interview, it was sunset and the party was winding down a bit. Corazon and Emily were swimming in the heated pool during the interview, but Hadeel had forgotten to bring a swimsuit and was sitting poolside, trying to avoid getting bitten by ants.
Hadeel: My first question is: both of you have, simultaneously, your artist practices and community outreach and cooking practices for people living on Skid Row–
Corazón: We do have that! How did you know that? (laughter)
Hadeel: I read the brief! (laughter) I did my research! But do you feel like these outreach programs are essential to your studio practice? Do they inform your art practice, or do they feel separate?
Emily: I feel like they definitely inform my studio practice. I was saying to you (Corazón) and Tim that for a long time I’ve felt like I’ve kept my food and sculptural practices separate because there were a lot of questions asked, more than I had answers to. I think as I’ve gotten more comfortable over the years both with working with food and with working with my materials, I would rather have all be just kind of tangled into one. Both on a community level and the way I love to work with people, and with how I work with clay and with food. There’s an overlap of language with those materials; like kneading dough and working with clay. So, long story short I really have it all tangled.
Emily (towards Corazón): Where do you see that for you? You were talking to me early about growing up cooking with your mom, you know?
Corazón: I think I’m really similar, cause I’m not educated in art. I’m self taught, and also in food I’m self taught. So, it’s all really intuitive, there’s not a recipe. But, it’s interesting because I’m cooking a lot. For Skid Row food, it’s like humongous pots of chicken stew and like cornbread. It’s not like here where it’s different dishes, where you’re working with whatever is in season.
But, in a way, for me making the art has always been this refuge. I call it my dream cave, where I go into this universe, this secret world where I can just explore and probably fail. You know? Like probably make ugly shit that no one will ever see, and it doesn’t matter. It’s really a private space, and I have a real distrust of the art world so I was never like “I’m gonna make nice things,” even though I’m in the art world. At a certain point my gallery would be like, “Your shit’s too dark, you’re making things too dark. It has to be lighter,” and I was like, well, that’s not what I make.
But recently because I’ve been cooking for a living lately, and for people that I care about; When I’m cooking I think about it as a gift, and I get so excited to share this beautiful experience. Now, suddenly, when I’m making my work, I’m thinking about it as a gift. I’m still going to my interior dream cave, but I’m mostly consciously thinking about it as a gift for the people I love.
Hadeel: That makes me think of cooking for people you love, and the way – at least how it’s described in the press release for Radical Kinship – your piece in the show is related to the archiving of your mother’s work.
Corazón: And to housing! I’ve been working on housing.
Hadeel: Yeah! So like, the act of care from cooking is related to the act of care of artmaking?
Corazón: Yeah, I don’t know because I’m kind of in the middle of it. I had so much anger because basically when I started to show more internationally, I’d be at an art fair and someone would tell me like, “Oh my god, that matches my curtains in my house in Miami. Oh! Maybe that would match the living room of my house in the Hamptons!” (laughter)
This is a spell that I just went so deep on, I cried when I made this. It’s the residue of such a cathartic experience and you’re gonna put it in a place that matches and you don’t even care? So I stepped back from making beautiful things, and started making things nobody could put in their house. Pretty abject stuff. So yeah, I feel like recently I’m shifting and thinking in a way that is more… I guess I’m healing. I mean I still love making abject stuff, it’s what I like.
Emily: Well we need it! To riff on what you’re saying, I’ve been thinking about that a lot in the sense that I love trying to make beautiful things. I love seeing beautiful things, like in nature and painting things. I love making work about things that I love very much, but I also think about the history of artists trying to say “fuck you” to a gallery and to capitalism. Like making land art, or cutting through a road and having that be the work, in the context of you making abject things.
I’ve been thinking about this, it’s not resolved because I think we’re in a really shitty place in the world. But also as someone who is working with a gallery for the first time, and selling work to a wider audience, I was trying to police the work really hard. But I’ve been having conversations with different people that I care a lot about, and they were like “Do you see a world where you can make work that can help change the mind of some of these people?” And I’ve been trying to live in that space right now.
Not necessarily trying to make work to change minds, but say that the art matches the curtains and that person has big decisions that they’re making about the world, and the work you’re making is able to have a visual conversation during that decision making, that could be really cool. Do you know what I mean?
Hadeel: My context for your work is the work in Radical Kinship, the ceramic piece, River Rat. Is that idea of infiltration related to the choice of ceramics? Historically ceramic is used to create decorative or utilitarian objects and has existed in a domestic space, are you using something beautiful as a tool for changing minds?
Emily: Yeah! Oftentimes with my work people are like, “The work is so joyful, so beautiful,” and I’m like it’s also sad and those creatures are dying. Almost always the creatures have a tear come out, I think that often gets lost in my work. I was talking with Sam, my husband, this week about art. Different art that has a different impact than mine, that is more heavy hitting and more political, and the things that right now we should be more pissed about than we are. I was like, “Maybe I’m not trying hard enough?” I think in my mind and when I’m in my practice that I’m trying so hard to get to a place that can help change minds and help raise awareness – or help be mad or help be joyful. I want to do all of those things, and I think maybe as artists we’re all trying to figure those things out. But, I think that ceramics are a funny medium because people want them to be craft, or they want them to be a mug, y’know? I went to UCLA for undergrad and there are brilliant ceramicists there, and they were so strict and persnickety about the rules.
Corazón: Really? I didn’t know that
Emily: Ceramics are just so – you have to do it this way, or you can’t do it this way. It’s a very rule bound medium. I loved being at a school where I learned that, and then I worked for an artist that would break all those rules – Sterling Ruby. I worked for him for three years making that work, and then I went to grad school. I think between UCLA and working with Sterling, and also I know a lot of different types of artists, and a lot of ceramic artists.
When you get to a place where you can break rules – The piece at the Feminist Center is a pretty orderly Ceramic, with a capital ‘C’, by the book thing. Some of my work is like that and some of my work is not, and I’m trying to live within all of those spaces. But it’s funny that the one there is pretty, I don’t know.
Corazón: It improves the whole show, your piece, it’s so tender.
Emily: Oh, thank you!
Hadeel: I think with the works in the show, you can picture them in relation to the human body. Like Patty Chang’s piece and (referring to Corazón’s work) the holes in your piece that you can physically go into. River rat manifests that in the hand, you see your hand as the artist in the work and then visualize the connection to the person. Whereas some of the other work is existing in relation to the audience’s body. That contrast is really the first thing that hit me about the work.
Hadeel: Ok, I do have more questions.
Corazón: Wait, the one thing I have to say about that is, I love making whatever comes to me, because I’m making a spell and I’m channeling it. Most of the time the work comes out and I’m just like, “What the fuck is that, it’s so weird.”
Like all those little houses, (referring to The Way the Light Touches the Wall at Sunset) they each had a moment where I was trying to make something, I had an idea, and then I had to destroy that. That’s when the piece gets good, not until I get to the “Fuck it” moment where I just don’t give a fuck and I’m like whatever I’ll just throw it away. Then the real stuff can happen! I don’t really get to do that in cooking, in cooking I want it to taste good. I can’t just throw all this food away. (laughter from the group)
Hadeel: That reminds me of something my professor, Allison Miller, said. She –
Emily: Wait, I love Allison!
Hadeel: She describes painting sometimes as like, you start with the idea of what it should be and then you have to contend with what the piece actually is and what it actually needs. Your like, “Fuck it” moment made me think of that. That transition between this is what I think it should be and then this is what I have and this is what I have to deal with.
Emily: Yeah, I call that moment for me, “The only way forward is through,” (“ohhhhhh” from the group). I’ll start something and think that it’s totally a piece of shit, but I have to keep going.
I have a very embarrassing but very quick side story. I grew up speed skating competitively, and I was a good athlete as a young kid. It was just something I did well. Later on, as a teenager, I would try to learn guitar and different things that I was not good at immediately. I just was not practicing and not really investing and pushing through, and that made me not try. Now, I’m very deeply invested in a space where the only way forward is through, I have to just see this thing to the end and whatever it’s going to become. Hopefully something will come of that. But that skating part is an embarrassing little side story – there’s an ant climbing me, oh they do bite.
Hadeel: I know, look, they’ve bit me all over my leg.
(The conversation is paused to swipe away all of the ants, and for Hadeel to relocate. Corazón also briefly swims away to talk to someone.)
Hadeel: Ok, so my second question you kind of already answered it. It was, how does your relationship to cooking also manifest in your artist practice. But you already spoke about that.
Corazón: Yeah it’s connected, I think making the food and getting to see people happy and nourished. Everything is a spell, the work is a spell and the cooking is a spell. I’m making spells when i cook, it’s always the same spell: Maybe this unknot all of the stuck places. May this bring us closer to liberation. I think having that space where I can make tender soft things, it’s totally liberated my work.
I was making these really weird sculpture pieces that were kind of dark and fucked up. My gallerist even told me she didn’t like them, and we’re really good friends. So I started thinking it’s not a good piece. Then my friend, who is an art writer, said she liked it, so I gave it to her. She was having a baby, she had twins, and now it’s one of her son’s favorite pieces. It’s like this creature coming out – or I guess I think it’s a creature, you would just think it’s a shape – but now he has this whole thing where it’s a monster from another dimension that’s visiting. He said to his mom, “I really like art monsters,” and so it found its right home while still getting to be abject. The food liberates that for me.
Emily: Making people happy with cooking, cooking for friends, family, and doing the work for Skid Row has that feeling of making someone so happy with food. Beautiful, delicious tasting food that keeps them alive is so exciting. Food is so crazy that way, the range of survival to decadence. Like, I was just in Vegas and France and New York and there’s such a range of luxury around food there. But to be able to give someone a cup of rice and beans, with some toppings, it’s so exciting.
It’s not caviar – making a pot of beans is one of my favorite things on earth to do. My best friend is Colombian, so I’ve just been deep in that kind of cooking forever. But that’s for another time.
Corazón: And it’s a collaboration though, because it’s with the plant and with the Earth. That’s the thing about cooking too, I mean with art I like making installations that touch all the sense, but when I started cooking more professionally I became so immersed. It’s the smell, it’s visual, the sound when you’re cooking.
Emily: You have a relationship with the farmers, too.
Hadeel: That’s super interesting, thank you. Sorry, I’m literally being swarmed by ants. I do have another question. This is kind of a pivot from the food conversation, but I’ve found that both of your pieces create simulated or alternative presents in the world.
For example describing the People Homes as an Indigenous rewilding, not a speculative future or past, but an alternative present. Or River Rat having a combination of the Arroyo Seco and also the Sacramento and American River ecosystems. Both works create these alternate ecosystems, so how do you think of our human connection to nature and the ecosystem?
Emily: I’ve lost a lot, my mom, my dog, my friends. The loss that I’ve gone through, for most of my life I’ve felt like this “death” person. I started losing people at a very young age, a lot younger than my friends and family. I felt like I was a jinx, and now I live in a world where people come to me, like I’ve been staying all weekend with a friend who just lost their dog. I have a lot to say in this department, is what I’m trying to say.
For me, basically, as a non religious person but as someone who loves their people and creatures a lot, I love nature a lot. I grew up where the American river and Sacramento river meet and I know every twist and turn in the river. My parents took me out on the river, and now being down here I spend a lot of time in the Arroyo.
I find that as I’ve lost people, all the creatures we see – regardless of whether it’s the day-to-day sort of Monarch or coyote or raccoon – I talk to everything. Like, “Hey mom!” if there’s a bug that’s buzzing around me I’m like, “Mom, stop.” It helps me maintain a day-to-day relationship with who I’ve lost. The physical body is no longer here, and I channel that through so many plants and species. I anthropomorphize a lot, I’m always trying to check if what I’m doing is crazy. Sometimes it’s more quotidian and other times there have been some serious animal interactions that have felt very present and affirming. So when I’m painting birds or sculpting animals, it’s very much this moment where I’ve fully invested in them being my mom or my dog. I like that fluidity in nature.
The show that I did with my gallery and the piece I did with the Feminist Center are the first times I’ve been able to pay homage to my Northern California and Southern California roots, and all of those creatures whose physical bodies are no longer here. I just got to lovingly paint them. Does that answer that?
Corazón: I know in my bones that we’re part of an organism, and we’re magical beings. We have infinite powers and our powers are really activated when we work together. In the future we’re gonna remember how to activate that because it was violently taken out of our experience because people were scared and wanted power. This is our space ship and we drive it collectively, the whole universe. We came here to play.
Not to say that there’s not violence, but all the work I do is a gesture to remind people that we’re wild.
Emily: We’re wild and we love each other fiercely. We care a lot.
Corazón: Yes! That’s what we’re here to do. It’s beautiful when we get to do it, it feels like a channel uninterrupted when we get to do it.
Emily: I feel that, and I feel like it’s easy to get cynical, which I am, but I also love to love things fiercely. I try to check that cynicism because this current world is trying to make us not give a fuck, when we really need to give a fuck.