Snakes are seen by many as danger noodles, venomous vipers or devilish tempters. San Antonio artist Audrya Flores regards serpents as creatures of complex mythology deserving respect, awe and honor.
During a recent San Antonio River Foundation workshop at Confluence Park, Flores asked participants to help create a large-scale, outdoor serpent sculpture. In introducing the project, Flores said serpents “mean something different to everybody. They’re a charged symbol, for different cultures, different religions especially.”
But for her, “the serpent represents a healing path. And I’ve dedicated my life to healing. I’m on a healing journey now.”
Wondrous and magical
Flores works primarily with natural materials found in common yards and gardens, including cactus, tree blossoms, yucca stems, fruits, thorns, stalks and leaves, to create animal forms drawn from both personal and cultural mythology.
For the workshop, she laid out a basic serpent form using wavy leaf nopal for the scales and maguey leaves for jaws along a gentle slope leading from the park’s sheltered concrete slab to a paved path below. The sculpture would be collaborative, with workshop participants invited to wander the surrounding garden to observe and collect flora to contribute to building the serpent.
In Flores’ eyes, the gathering process is itself collaborative. Of the plants around them, she told participants, “As you start walking and thinking about the serpent, they’re going to already start collaborating with you.”
As a former primary school teacher, Flores is familiar with the sensibilities of children. “I’m also coaxing your inner children out today. I think it’s really important that they come out and that we view nature through children’s eyes. It’s this incredible, wondrous, magical, miraculous place.”
Our womb and our tomb
Though in the magic of nature lies mystery, and even ferocity, as Flores’ artworks illustrate. Her ink-on-paper drawing titled “Devouring Mother” in the Resilient and Responsive: Artists and the Environment exhibition currently on view at the Culture Commons gallery represents Mother Earth as a chimeric creature with giant maguey mandibles holding a spiderweb, sharp talons and a rattlesnake tail.
Inside the belly of the “mother earth monster deity” are a skull and a curled embryo. “She is fearsome and scary and beautiful and gross and deadly and incredible,” Flores said. “She’s magical, but she represents that duality, birth and death, the womb and the tomb.”
The drawing portrays humanity’s fraught relationship with its home planet and acts as a reminder. “Don’t forget how incredible our mother is. Let’s adore her, let’s respect her, let’s tend to her. She’s everything, she’s our womb and our tomb. She gave us life and we’ll return to her after we’re dead.”
As if to emphasize the thorny nature of the natural world, Flores nailed needle-sharp huisache thorns around the salvaged wooden frame in coiled, barbed wire-like forms.
Magic and knowledge
Workshop participants Lee Ann Epstein and Cara Salinas gathered blossoms dropped from a palo verde tree at the parking lot entrance to Confluence Park and covering the dark gray gravel with a shower of bright yellow petals. The petals would be used to form the iris of the serpent’s eye, surrounding a pupil of red mountain laurel seeds.
Epstein has been a friend of Flores since the two were on the Alamo City Roller Girls roller derby team together years ago. More recently they formed a gardening club exchanging cuttings and tips.
Working with plants has taught her how to work with people, that “different people need different environments, different amounts of attention, so that they can thrive,” she said.
She joined the workshop because she’s drawn to Flores’ art. “It’s amazing how it emerges from her mind,” Epstein said.
Salinas had taken similar workshops with Flores years ago at Spare Parts, she said, and as an artist had worked with Flores to lead an art project at Brackenridge High School.
“She definitely has a magic and a knowledge about plant life and how to use them,” Salinas said.
Epstein said she grew up Catholic and once saw the serpent as a negative symbol, but she appreciates how Flores draws out masculine and feminine dualities that the snake can represent. “I like that it sheds regularly,” she said of the snake’s molting process, “so I think it’s very feminine in that way.”
A fearsome expert
In several exhibitions, Flores has employed the serpent and other animal and plant forms to address trauma she experienced in childhood.
A 2022 sculpture titled Walking the Healing Path shown in March as part of her cyclic solo exhibition in the Palo Alto College Project Space Gallery combined leather sandals with a snake form constructed with wire, cardboard, vinyl, obsidian chips and lava beads. The cycle of the title refers both to the molting mentioned by Epstein and to the ancient snake-swallowing-its-tail form known as an ouroboros.
As Flores wrote in a blog entry, “Healing, like the serpent, is cyclic. It is perpetually growing, shedding, and curving back around to face reactivated trauma with fresh new skin. Healing is frightening but beautiful. And sometimes, if you are patient and brave, healing will swallow you whole.”
Her own healing process has included trauma therapy meant to address her wounded inner child. As a trauma survivor, she had assumed “the child that experienced those things was dead. I didn’t know that there were still things I could do that could help her.”
During therapy she had a terrifying vision of a huge barn owl, staring at her with its intense, unblinking gaze. But she learned that barn owls fly silently in the dark, employing hypersensitive hearing to locate unsuspecting prey.
“I imagined the barn owl going in and swooping up my inner child and pulling her out of these dark places … so I could tend to her,” Flores said. “It was too scary for me to do by myself. I needed this fearsome expert to come show me the way.”
Since then, the barn owl has become a guiding entity in her life, recognized through a larger-than-life wearable owl sculpture made from cornhusks. Soul Retrieval was shown in the Trauma and Response exhibition at UTSA’s Main Art Gallery in 2021.
She could imagine herself wearing the owl sculpture like Perseus of Greek myth, gifted a shield and sword and sandals by the gods “so that he could go in and face the Medusa,” Flores said.
Extraordinary use of space
Children’s book author Xelena Gonzalez recalls meeting Flores on the Holmes High School Huskies swim team. “She was always drawing,” in a chola style familiar to West Siders, Gonzalez said.
The two lost touch but reconnected briefly as art instructors for a family day at the McNay Art Museum. Gonzalez then saw Flores’ 2019 Digging installation at the Central Library, involving a serpent made from cactus pads snaking through the lobby space.
Having worked previously at the library, Gonzalez said, “I saw that gallery space every day for years … and it was the most extraordinary use of that space that I had seen in all those years, not just as a librarian but as a patron and as a parent.”
The two reconnected and have since worked together on a project Gonzalez created with a grant from the Department of Arts and Culture. The oral tradition storytelling project titled The Smallest Thing was presented in February at the Carver Community Cultural Center, and Gonzalez said children in the audience were immediately rapt with attention at Flores’ drawing of a stylized Lechuza, the barn owl witch of borderlands mythology.
“They saw so much in that one piece of art of hers, they were so intrigued by it,” and had no trouble building a story from the image, Gonzalez said.
In the witchy owl’s braided hair, feathers made of eyes, raking talons and crescent moon roost, “there’s so many little secrets buried inside of her work. And she’s so intentional with everything she does,” Gonzalez said.
Flores’ outdoor serpent sculpture will transform in its natural setting through May 31, and a wall sculpture made from wasp nests will be on view at Space C7 gallery also through the month. The Resilient and Responsive show will be on view at the Culture Commons gallery through January 17.
