Aurora Molina is a figurative fiber sculpture artist, using embroidery as a drawing instrument, and fabric as a material for building large sculptural installations, tapestries, marionettes, and small wall drawings that capture people of all ages and backgrounds, and the environments in which they live. Each has its own spirit; some playful, some grotesque, others belligerent and some with a more serious side. Some contain satirical, even subversive political commentaries. Each one tells a story that appeals to our social consciousness and narrates stories, whether about childhood or aging, family, climate change or anthropoid-like creatures with animal instincts, immigration or life in one of the many cultures in which she has lived and worked. She says “The use of fabric and the obsessiveness of embroidery defines my work and honors that centuries-old legacy of women weavers and artisans.”

Photography, video, robotics and more have been utilized in the telling of her many stories. “Whereas society has slowly created “fictions” and “virtual realities” to replace the real, I instead direct the spectator’s attention to the everyday real happenings of ordinary lives.” Some works use stockings to make her creatures appear crude, more visceral, “as if the skin had been removed to reveal what’s beneath, to expose the rawness of tissue and blood”. She says “it is the grotesque nature of these pieces that is meant to invite deeper explorations into the true nature of the character, in order to seduce the spectator to reexamine his or her own psychological vulnerabilities”.

Aurora Molina was born in La Havana, Cuba, in 1984, and emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen. She received her BA in Fine Arts from Florida International University, specializing in Mixed Media, and her MFA in Contemporary Art at the Universidad Europea de Madrid, completed in 2009. She currently lives in Miami, where she is a resident artist at the Bakehouse Art Complex, and is represented by Bernice Steinbaum Gallery. She also works as an art educator, teaching art to kids who are often from disadvantaged backgrounds or with developmental disabilities, in Miami, Oaxaca, Mexico, Yogjakarta, Indonesia, and Kota, India, often related to the aesthetics of their own cultural traditions.