about
Les Gomez-Gonzalez (b. New York, NY) is an artist and educator based in Miami, FL. Their interdisciplinary practice is grounded in a living relationship with clay that engages in repetitive gestures, tasks, and forms to explore daily routines for bodily care. Les holds 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 the 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). Most recently, they received the 2024 Zenobia Award for Watershed’s Summer Residency.
Les is a co-founder of Comedor Azul (est. 2021), a collective project consisting of a blue table that travels to different communities in an effort to share, listen, and sit together. Since 2022, Les has taught wheel-throwing and hand-building at various ceramics studios.Through their ceramic workshops, they facilitate learning spaces which are grounded in the collective co-creation of intentionality, mindfulness, and radical slowness.
This practice is grounded in a living relationship with clay, which acknowledges clay as a being and ancestor.
Les engages in repetitive gestures, tasks, and forms to explore daily routines for bodily care. Often working with their own body, Les finds forms of healing through articulating the spiritual and regenerative processes of clay, addressing chronic pains and illness, and negotiating a homeostatic system’s needs against challenges of contemporary living (natural environment, reproductive care, and emotional labor).
Since 2020, Les has been working with kaolin epk and redart clay, refined materials from different U.S. mines. These materials serve 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 by 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, 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 to actively work through generational trauma that can no longer bear itself. Ultimately manifesting as a collection of clay residue, photos, videos, and paper, recontextualizing, repurposing, and archiving the entire lives of these materials, which endlessly contain everything and everyone they've held.