Alessandra Sequeira | The EMDR Series
The works now available through MÍRAME come directly from Enraizada – Donde el Miedo se Desvanece (Rooted – Where Fear Dissolves), presented earlier this year at the Museo Dr. Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia in San José — one of the most significant exhibitions of Costa Rican and Latin American mixed media art presented in San José in recent years.
The work was years in the making, produced during and following Sequeira's engagement with EMDR therapy, a trauma-processing treatment that uses rhythmic ocular movement to help the nervous system revisit painful memories. The work is explicitly autobiographical. Paintings, textile sculpture and large-scale installation together map the arc of psychological rupture and repair, and as Sequeira writes in the catalogue, the series is the record of "the hardest but most self-loving journey" of her life. The exhibition has now closed and the works are available through MÍRAME.
Alessandra Sequeira (photography by Julio Sequeira)
Alessandra Sequeira has spent more than two decades building an international exhibition record. She has shown in Basel, London and New York, with solo exhibitions at the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (MADC) and the Calderón Guardia Museum, and her work has entered the permanent collection of the Museum of the 5th Triennial of Riga, Latvia. She has received the Dante Alighieri International Award at the Biennale Peschiera del Garda and the Caravaggio International Experience Award in Rome.
The Materials
Much of what makes this series exceptional — and places it within the broader tradition of Latin American mixed media art — is the range and specificity of materials Sequeira brought to it.
A mineral sourced from the mountains of Peru gives the teal circles in several works a uniquely specific luminosity. Sea salt is mixed with natural minerals to build blues and teals — a direct homage to the tear, to salt water, to the energy of the sea as a site of healing. Coffee and guaitil — a native Costa Rican tree whose fruit has been used as a natural dye by indigenous communities for centuries — replace conventional pigment in others, entwining the local landscape and its long history.
Ámate paper, used as a stencil, leaves its impression in the first layer. Thread — thousands of individual strands — is embroidered into and onto canvas surfaces already built up with ink, acrylic and charcoal. You can appreciate that it took Sequeira years to complete this body of work.
Alessandra Sequeira, EMDR I
The ten works available through MÍRAME move through this vocabulary in different ways. The square format canvases — EMDR I and EMDR II — are among the most concentrated. EMDR I presents a perfect teal circle enclosing a dense mass of black branching forms, the teal built from Peruvian mineral. For Sequeira, the iris maps epigenetic memory — the black of the eye a guide into an unknown neuronal space.
EMDR II radiates outward from the centre, threads raised from the surface, ink caught mid-movement, layer upon layer of material accumulating. It appears like something organice, something alive — a cell, a root system, an organism caught in the act of growing. Here water becomes the agent of healing, the wound slowly closing.
Alessandra Sequeira, EMDR II
The palette of EMDR IV is from coffee, guaitil, tea, Chinese ink, pencil and charcoal — liquids brewed and plant-derived, materials that predate industrial pigment. The branching forms rise across a pale ground in grey and brown, spare and deliberate.
EMDR VII (cover image) is one of the most expansive of the works in the series — a dense horizontal mass of black and white thread across the centre, branching forms spreading above and below. The ground behind is pale blue-grey, patterned and soft, the effect of looking up through tree branches at an open sky. Against that stillness, the foreground thread is visceral and immediate — nostalgia and raw emotion occupying the same surface.
EMDR VII (detail)
Colour plays a significant role in several of the works. EMDR III — ochres, inks, mineral pigments and acrylic on canvas with textile intervention — floods the surface in deep blue and indigo, achieved with mineral pigments. EMDR IX, charcoal, Chinese ink, acrylic ink and cotton thread on canvas, introduces a vivid arterial red into the branching forms — cotton thread laid over and into the surface, the crimson standing sharply against black and grey.
Alessandra Sequeira, EMDR III
Across the series, the branching form — root system, nervous system, tree canopy — is Sequeira's persistent structure. These are paintings made from her body, about the body, with materials drawn from the natural world.
The EMDR series is available to explore on the MÍRAME website.
These pieces took years to complete and come straight from a national museum. Sequeira's career is gaining significant international momentum — and this is a rare opportunity to acquire work from a series of this depth and personal significance.
A PDF catalogue is also available upon request — contact Belinda at [email protected] to receive it or to enquire about any of the works.
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