Hiding in Plain Sight: A Sculptor’s Journey from Silence to Substance

Natural light portrait of a woman in shadow, titled “Hidden in Plain Sight.” Photographed by Ava Garcia-Pomales Bock. A reflection of emotional vulnerability and presence.

There is a phrase I have carried with me for much of my life: hiding in plain sight. For years, it described both how I moved through the world and how I approached making art. I learned early to observe closely while revealing very little of myself. Long before I understood what that meant for my practice, I became comfortable looking outward.

Photography gave that instinct somewhere to go. Through the camera, I learned to notice what people reveal without words: expression, posture, light, gesture, and the subtle changes that happen when someone becomes aware of being seen. I was particularly drawn to photographing people whose experiences carried complexities that weren't immediately visible. People trusted me to photograph them, and I learned how much an image could communicate without explaining everything around it.

But the camera also gave me somewhere to hide. I could remain behind it, concentrating on another person, another place, another story. That worked until I began trying to use photography to understand my own experiences. The visual language that had helped me look outward no longer felt sufficient when I turned it inward. For a time, I stopped making photographs altogether.

A professor eventually asked whether I was willing to let go of photography and try another medium. That question changed my practice. Sculpture required me to think differently. Instead of capturing something already visible, I had to build a physical language for things that did not necessarily have a recognizable form. Shape could hold tension, material could contain or resist, and surface, weight, repetition, light, shadow, and space could communicate without requiring an image to explain what had happened.

As the work became more abstract, I found that I could be more direct. I no longer needed to illustrate an experience in order to acknowledge its presence. I could consider what remained afterward: a trace, an interruption, a division, a repetition, an absence. That shift eventually became visible in works such as Confrontation. The work did not need to recount the events that informed it. The material could carry some of its weight without revealing every detail of the story behind it.

Confrontation Collection” – Three individual wall sculptures cast in multiple layers of opaque polyurethane resin. Each piece measures 36x12x0.5 inches, mounted on 36x12x2 inch pine cradle panels.

That realization fundamentally changed how I understood abstraction. For a period, I thought becoming a sculptor meant leaving photography behind. It didn't. I eventually returned to the camera, but my relationship with it had changed. Photography remains part of my practice alongside drawing, painting, and sculpture. The distinction between those forms matters less to me now than what each allows me to notice and communicate.

Photography taught me to observe, while sculpture taught me to give form to what couldn't be photographed. Abstraction taught me something else: honesty does not require disclosure.

My work remains autobiographical, but autobiography does not require explaining every experience behind it. Sometimes the clearest way I can speak about something is through a line, a material, a photograph, an object, or the space left between them.

I am no longer interested in hiding, but I have learned that being seen and revealing everything are not the same thing.