With no formal art training or background, Pacheco truly succeeds in showcasing her extreme sensitivity, using the harrowing stories of womanhood to capture a uniquely powerful portrayal of a seemingly powerless time in her life, entrusting audiences with her most vulnerable self.
The self-uncertainty and inner turmoil that most Los Angeles transplants procure is precisely what artist Sonni Pacheco emanates through her sculptures. The raw and vulnerable nature of her pieces externalize her ability to be honest in a setting where vanity and status cloud authenticity, obscuring what it means to be human, and more especially, what it means to be a woman.
Reacquiring her sense of self worth, sexuality, and dominance, using the female form is representative of a woman’s ability to survive malleability. The notion that women can aid torment, afflict powerlessness onto themselves through the abuse and manipulation of affluent men, yet also remain resilient, allowing their minds and bodies to bend but not break.
Through the physicality of clay, Pacheco intimately transfers her anxieties and inadequacies onto her subjects, relishing in the strength, beauty, and power the female form embodies. The safety sculpting gave Pacheco during a traumatic recovery from a depleting and abusive relationship, allowed her to embrace the fragility, depression, fear, and anger, and appropriate pain as a catalyst. This release can be seen in her technical precision and innate ability to create rebirth and power through the use of uncomfortable and suggestive positions, taking back female dominance.
Pacheco’s use of skulls allows her to reconnect to the primitive nature of humanity, specifically the relationship between men and women. The displaced power dynamics encountered today are avidly evocative, allowing Pacheco a platform to showcase the rise from emotional captivity. Pacheco redirects the internal emptiness abuse induces, and focuses on creating primal statements by connecting life and body, with disparity and death.
