Statement

I work with synthetic waste collected from my own consumption, from other people and from what I find on everyday walks in the places I have lived. With these fragments I build landscapes, portraits and objects in which the polluting material stops being a subject and becomes substance. For me, residual plastic is material, archive and denunciation.

My training as a photographer and my time in marine biology coexist in my practice without resolving into a single discipline. I use the rigor of scientific observation, its classifications, processes and scales, as a conceptual structure, and the intuition of bodily gesture, weaving, transferring, burning and layering, as a method of production. This is why I turn to techniques such as cyanotype, heat pressing and image transfer, processes in which the image becomes dirty, degrades or physically fragments, rather than merely describing the degradation it portrays.

Technical errors in the image, such as blur, high-ISO noise and loss of sharpness, hold a deliberate place in my work; they are accidental triggers and working metaphors for environmental failure. The image degrades in the same way as the ecosystem it tries to represent. That correspondence between the materiality of the image and the materiality of the damage is what shapes the structure of my method.

My work offers neither redemption nor an easy way out of the plastic crisis. It questions the illusion of "pristine" landscapes, points to those in industry who construct it, and makes the work a witness and, at times, a material accomplice to the pollution it critiques.

Biography

Born in Guadalajara, Jalisco. She graduated with a Bachelor's in Visual Arts for Photographic Expression from the Universidad de Guadalajara in 2016. Five years later, she began a Bachelor's in Marine Biology at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, an experience that became the methodological foundation of her work. She went on to complete the Master's in Visual Arts in the Graduate Program in Arts and Design at UNAM.

Her practice centers on image studies; she sees photography as a fragment of the real, permeated by the matter it represents. She builds pieces from fragments of plastic waste collected on her walks. Starting from error, she uses techniques such as transfer, cyanotype, heat pressing, layered waste and light to reveal degradation in the image and to symbolize the fragility of the environment, creating a dialogue between scientific processes and artistic methods.

In 2026, "Mediaciones del mundo a través del pensamiento fotográfico" was published in Investigación-Producción. Perspectivas sobre la Imagen FAD-PAD. The year before, she presented at the "Naturaleza y Ciudad" Colloquium of UNAM's Graduate Program in Arts and Design; that same year, her work was part of the exhibition "¿Hacia dónde va el mundo? Arte, Diseño y Ciencia" at the Academia de San Carlos. In 2022, under the pseudonym Nancy Ohno, she published the series "Plastic Islands" in the journal Liminar. Her pieces were shown in the CUCSH Conversaciones exhibition in 2017 and in "Ishibumi", an artist's book made with Lia, at Foro Larva in 2014. Díaz's work is an ongoing interdisciplinary exploration and a dialogue between art, science and the environment in the contemporary context.