Across myth, literature, and art history, the female body has long mirrored the Earth—fertile, cyclical, wounded, resilient. In De Tierra y Susurros, her latest solo exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, Hilda Palafox revisits this enduring association with striking clarity and emotional intelligence. Drawing on ecofeminist thought, Latin American folklore, and modernist visual language, Palafox constructs a world where women and land are not symbolic stand-ins for one another, but intertwined forces sharing breath, fragility, and power.

The exhibition’s title—translated as Of Soil and Whispers—sets the tone. These works do not shout their politics. They murmur, invite, and linger, asking viewers to slow down and listen.

Painting as Care: Bodies Rooted in Landscape

Many of Palafox’s paintings stage intimate encounters between women and expansive desert terrains. Figures recline, face one another, or curl inward, their gestures echoing the contours of hills, dunes, and valleys. In Origen, two topless women rest in fetal positions while carefully cradling a sapling between them. The scene suggests protection rather than possession, growth rather than extraction.

Her palette of warm earth tones—ochres, terracottas, dusty pinks, and sun-bleached yellows— envelops each composition in an atmosphere that feels both ancient and tender. These hues root the works in soil while maintaining a dreamlike, almost ritual quality. Nature here is not a backdrop; it is a participant.

The effect is a quiet but insistent ecological awareness. Humanity and environment appear inseparable, bound by mutual vulnerability.

Folklore, Fracture, and the Threshold Between Worlds

Latin American folklore subtly animates the exhibition, reinforcing a spiritual lineage between women and land. In Presagio, two women face one another beside a broken chain-link fence as yellow butterflies drift between them. The fence—damaged, fraying—signals the fragility of imposed boundaries. One butterfly rest delicately on the wire, transforming an object of division into a site of metamorphosis.

The image suggests rupture: between the sacred and the mundane, the human-made and the organic. Butterflies, long associated with transformation and ancestral memory in Mexican symbolism, become emissaries between worlds.

This sense of threshold recurs throughout the exhibition, especially in Palafox’s sculptural reliefs.

Stone That Breathes: Sculpture as Passage

Carved from cantera stone, Palafox’s reliefs bring a tactile gravity to the show. In Portal III, a woman’s open mouth releases a thorned stem, while others coil around her face like serpents, blooming into roses. The imagery is visceral and mythic: voice becomes vegetation, breath becomes growth.

As the title suggests, the work functions as a portal—a passage between matter and spirit, interior and exterior. The human body transforms into a site of pollination and consciousness, echoing ecofeminist ideas that resist rigid separations between nature and self.

The stone, traditionally associated with permanence, paradoxically feels alive, animated by lines that spiral and bloom.

A Modernist Lineage, Reimagined

Palafox’s visual language is inseparable from her background. Trained as a graphic designer and based in Mexico City, she employs bold, flattened shapes and decisive lines reminiscent of Mexican modernists such as Juan O’Gorman, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo. Yet her work resists didactic muralism.

I like to think that my practice articulates a dialogue between the monumental legacy of muralism and Mexican modernism and the political and poetic potency of contemporary feminist practices.

– Palafox has said.

Line becomes both structure and trace; color acts as breath; composition holds balance and instability in equal measure.

This economy of form allows emotion and meaning to surface without excess.

Ecofeminism and the Power of Ambiguity

The philosophical undercurrent of De Tierra y Susurros resonates strongly with Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of a new mestiza consciousness—one that embraces ambiguity, hybridity, and inclusion. Palafox’s figures exist in this in-between state: human yet landscape, individual yet collective.

As Zona Maco founder Zélika García observed, Palafox imagines a matriarchal world where women move freely through inner and outer terrains, gaining strength through togetherness rather than domination.

Listening as Resistance

Rather than offering fixed narratives, Palafox creates spaces for attention and care. These paintings and reliefs ask viewers to pause, to attune themselves to subtle gestures, whispers, and thresholds. In a moment defined by ecological crisis and social fracture, De Tierra y Susurros proposes another mode of being—one grounded in listening, reciprocity, and embodied connection.

Hilda Palafox: De Tierra y Susurros is on view at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, through February 21, 2026.