Camila Isabelle Young

I prefer working with watercolor because it bleeds. Bleeding shapes identity—it burs the edges of it too. I paint to find poetry in ways of seeing, challenging binaries. Because binaries divide us. Interdependence and interconnection enthrall me. I've studied nature: how waves roll,  hurricanes destroy, words ramify.

And awe. I sit with awe.

My work has taken me from monastic communities in Sardinia and Galicia to the halls of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Art is a visual language that travels across cultures, which enables the exchange of perspectives. It connects us. I aim for my art to enable peaceful dialogues about the uncertain future.

I’m drawn to ancient philosophies that understood sustainability, reciprocity, and interconnection before climate change became a crisis.

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“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3-5)

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In order to challenge the way I see, I have pursued immersive fieldwork at the intersection of Catholic ecological thought, East-Asian environmental philosophy and theology, and Caribbean indigenous traditions. I am a daughter of cultural collision—with a Puerto-Rican mother and an American father—and this has greatly influenced my perspective on multicultural collaboration. Collision could be a place of creation, a place of love, and I hope this is evident in my work.

I wish to see the world through eyes of kinship and interdependence, rattling binaries that divide us.

We cannot have truth. It has us. We get to notice it. Live it. I create art so that I can attempt to be had by Truth.

I’m eager to collaborate. Please reach out if you’re interested in supporting a Climate Renaissance. I’m available for keynotes, museum exhibitions, artist residencies, and cultural coalition partnerships.

I’m currently based in Miami, my hometown, and this fall I will be moving to London for my MFA at the Royal College of Art.