Amber Robles-Gordon

 Sacred Co-Evolution: Undoing the Enchainment of Being(s)

Mixed Media on Fabric and Embroidery, 2025

Sacred Coevolution: Undoing the Enchainment of Being(s)

In Sacred Coevolution: Undoing the Enchainment of Being(s), Amber Robles-Gordon presents a visual mythology that challenges and reimagines the Western, Eurocentric construct known as The Great Chain of Being—a hierarchical framework developed during the Medieval Christian era. This cosmological system, thought to be divinely ordained, arranged all life and matter in a strict vertical order: from God, angels, and monarchs at the top, to commoners, animals, plants, and minerals below. Often illustrated as a diagram or cartographic chain, this structure reinforced the dominance of the Church, empire, and patriarchy by naturalizing inequality. Using the principles of Human Ecology and the scientific and metaphorical model of coevolution—the reciprocal adaptation and evolution of interdependent life forms—Robles-Gordon builds an alternate cosmology. One that decenters the Global North and its colonial, patriarchal, and exploitative legacy. Instead, this new paradigm honors the People of the Greater Majority—those from the Global South, Indigenous communities, and diasporic populations whose lives and spiritual systems have long been subjugated or erased through the violent mandates of the Doctrine of Discovery and colonization.

Through 6 large-scale mixed media assemblages, Robles-Gordon fuses non-traditional materials, symbolic abstraction, and allegorical characters to construct fabric visual representations of liberation, transformation, and reciprocal becoming. These artworks explore the metaphysical and material processes of “undoing enchainment”—the systemic, generational bindings of race, gender, land, and spirit.

The Artwork:

The theoretical structures of the artworks are grounded in their methods of creation—abstraction, mixed-media collage, textile arts, human rights, and the biological human systems. Each piece is conceived as a landscape and organized into two major themes. The first three artworks use textures, patterned fabrics or papers, and colors to evoke water and night. The remaining three center on the theme of land and day, employing similar materials to explore our human relationship with the earth and daylight.

Each artwork features a base layer and an embroidery hoop. The fabric within the base layer functions as a visual amalgamation of collective human cultural experiences. Within each circular form, abstracted symbols represent one or more of the eleven biological human systems. Extending beyond the base layer, the mixed-media assemblage embroidery hoop manifests the physical and spiritual dimensions of each theme.

At present, two artworks include both their base layers and embroidery hoops. The additional four embroidery hoops are currently in development.