Endnotes¹


Laura Padilla Castellanos
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    Artwork

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    Statement “Devotion is as unyielding as the grave. Love’s flames are flames of fire, flames that come from the Lord.” I often think of my work as unfinished fragments of my experience: memories, values, dreams, hopes, goals, and fears. They are precious moments where aspects of my life become open ended questions that widen my understanding of the world through visual symbols. In its “finished” state, my work seeks to invite the viewer to move into a space of speculation. I rely on my appreciation for conceptual typography and illustration to normalize and embrace inclusion, diversity, and acceptance. As an international student from a catholic background, throughout my time at Yale I have often sought safe haven in the stained glass windows of my church and the loving embrace of my parents. To me, religion was an extension of my family home, a place not only for comfort, but grounding love. My work in this thesis project is a close examination of Catholic symbols and their interactions with my queer experience. In this series of pieces, I reclaim religious objects and symbols by altering them, hoping to overwrite fears that exist and paralyze many religious members of the queer community (including myself). Intimately, this project is also a love letter to my parents. A testimony of the love and devotion that has become my faith, the main pillar keeping my belief in religion alive. My God is my family, and my heaven is queer.

    Student

    typefaces, religion, queer, typography, creating, objects, thesis, letters, work, beautiful, sibling, documents, family, parents, legible, type, religious, feel, question, combining
    “As of right now my thesis is creating a set of typefaces based on a few things that I've come to terms with during quarantine. I questioned my gender and sexual identity during quarantine as well as my connection to religion and family. And so based on these things, I'm creating typefaces, conceptual typefaces, that I can use later for typographical illustrations. I'm also using them to create objects. So I'm creating 3D replicas of a few of my typefaces to have an installation with posters. So it's a very involved project.”
    “I'm from Guatemala, that's where my parents met. And so with cultural tradition they couldn't necessarily hang out a lot just because of how culture was back then. So yeah, both of my families are very, very religious. So they were like, stay away haha. So my dad bought this notebook for my mom. And whenever they wouldn't see each other, because they were both athletes–they traveled a lot, and whenever they would see each other, they would exchange this notebook and write to each other in these pages.”
    “I really wanted to explore what that meant, just because this feels like such a historical item for my family that I didn't even know about until now. Also, I've read the majority of these letters and just getting to read about both of my parents' faith and what that means to them. And then trying to understand what religion means to me, in relation to them, has been something that I've been struggling with a little bit. So definitely something that I wanted to push in my thesis.”
    “I have three siblings and we will talk about this, that the more we live in the States, we continue to question what religion means to us more and more because a lot of the religion back in Latin America is very homophobic and sexist. And so it has all these undertones that we don't necessarily agree with anymore. So having to grapple with how to adjust this concept of faith with what I believe now.”
    “I want people to be able to read this, but also, this feels like something that cannot be legible in it, like I can’t fully understand it myself. So therefore, like, why should it be type that you can read?”
    Endnotes¹

    Laura Padilla Castellanos
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    Artwork

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  • 5
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    Statement “Devotion is as unyielding as the grave. Love’s flames are flames of fire, flames that come from the Lord.” I often think of my work as unfinished fragments of my experience: memories, values, dreams, hopes, goals, and fears. They are precious moments where aspects of my life become open ended questions that widen my understanding of the world through visual symbols. In its “finished” state, my work seeks to invite the viewer to move into a space of speculation. I rely on my appreciation for conceptual typography and illustration to normalize and embrace inclusion, diversity, and acceptance. As an international student from a catholic background, throughout my time at Yale I have often sought safe haven in the stained glass windows of my church and the loving embrace of my parents. To me, religion was an extension of my family home, a place not only for comfort, but grounding love. My work in this thesis project is a close examination of Catholic symbols and their interactions with my queer experience. In this series of pieces, I reclaim religious objects and symbols by altering them, hoping to overwrite fears that exist and paralyze many religious members of the queer community (including myself). Intimately, this project is also a love letter to my parents. A testimony of the love and devotion that has become my faith, the main pillar keeping my belief in religion alive. My God is my family, and my heaven is queer.

    Student