photo courtesy of

johann c. muñoz-tapasco | taken in Apartadó, COL

Les finds forms of healing through articulating the spiritual and regenerative processes of clay. They engage repeated gestures, tasks, and forms to explore routines for bodily care to support menstruation, mental health, chronic pain, and illness. They research different clay materials as sites for the reclamation of bodily autonomy, seeking to repair the effects of institutional apathy and the manipulation of Black and brown femme and queer bodies. In this way, clay is (re)inscribed as an agent of care, remedy, spiritual portal, and life-bearer, expressed through labors of care (such as the creation of vessels to hold sustenance, offerings, and histories) that honor intuitive and reimagined rituals.

Considering their family's migration to the United States from the Dominican Republic (Ayití), Les also addresses the cannibalization of memory through generations- memories and experiences consumed and transformed over time, often for survival. Clay’s regenerative and collective nature fosters the exploration of the fragility, resilience, and memory of the body- a process that is further translated through photography, video, sculpture and drawing. Les embraces the tensions, gaps, and stagnancies alongside the gifts of leisure, forgiveness, and time. Ultimately manifesting as a collection of clay residue, photos, videos, and paper, re-contextualizing, repurposing, and archiving the entire lives of these materials, which endlessly contain everything and everyone they've held.

Les earned a BFA in Studio Art and a minor in Art History from Florida International University (2020). They have since participated in several artist residencies, including Starworks’ Material Research Residency in Star, NC (2025), Finca Morada Artist-in-Residence program in North Miami, FL (2022), the Orange Door Residency Program in Princeton, NJ (2022), and the Chautauqua Visual Arts Residency in Chautauqua, NY (2021). In 2024, they received the Zenobia Award for Watershed’s Summer Residency.

Les is a co-founder of Comedor Azul (est. 2021), a collective project based in Miami, FL that consisted of a blue table traveling to various communities to share, listen, and sit together. Since 2022, Les has taught wheel-throwing and hand-building at various ceramics studios throughout South Florida and Upstate NY. Through their ceramic workshops, they facilitate learning spaces that are grounded in the collective co-creation of intentionality, mindfulness, and radical slowness. Currently, they manage a sliding-scale ceramics studio with Finca Morada, a LGBTQIA+ & BIPOC-centered cooperative of artists, activists, farmers, & nature stewards living within a half-acre urban agroecological food forest garden sanctuary in North Miami, FL.

***

i nstagram

ABOUT