Manuela Guzmán

MFA Illustration

Love Letters to Insects

Manuela Guzmán is a visual artist born in Bogotá, Colombia. Based on her consistent sketchbook practice, her work approaches drawing as a place of interaction with one’s surroundings for discovery, belonging, and inner transformation.

Informed by natural history and decolonial studies, she is interested in imagery that challenges the binaries separating humans from nature and thoughts from emotions. Through autobiographical narratives, she explores themes of ecology, identity, and connection. As an artist and educator, she finds meaning in the exchange created through drawing, reading, and engaging with others, which informs her passion for visual storytelling, expressed through illustration, painting, comics, and artist books.

Love Letters to Insects is a series of artists’ books that mimics a scientific insect collection and asks how visual narrative can shape and reframe our relationship to our environment.

By delving into the historical construction of the nature-culture divide, her thesis considers how colonial history has shaped modes of representation in Latin America that distance, objectify, and ‘other’ living beings. In eight illustrated letters that center on play, motion, intimacy, and relational thinking, she revisits her personal experience and relationship with insects and examines how she learned to relate to her environment. Through a playful approach to her drawing practice, she explores each insect as a new lens of perception, finding in visual storytelling a place to challenge and resist the violent, inherited narratives of scientific approaches. In this way, “learning about” insects becomes “learning from” them.