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As a child Insuaste envisioned her parents’ native Ecuador as a magical place. Her mom talked about seeing a troll while pregnant, and her grandmother reportedly saw her grandfather fighting a shadow. The snowcapped mountains of her parents’ province, Chimborazo, awed her on a first visit there when she was six. Later, while majoring in anthropology and art at Dartmouth, she made trips to Ecuador that combined study and activism, witnessing the political turmoil there. When she arrived on a study grant after her freshman year, in 1994, the roads were blocked by Indians and campesinos protesting changes to the land laws. On a 1999-2000 visit after college, she took part in the protests, mostly by Indians, that ultimately brought down the government in Quito. During that trip she perceived the Ecuadoran landscape to be as unstable as the political situation: she saw volcanic ash rising from a mountain through her Quito window, then coating the city. After her second college trip, she began painting abstract fragmented landscapes inspired by the Andean mix of alternating patches of cultivated land with mountain rock. She noticed that similar geometrical patterns were also part of Inca textiles–and thinks they were inspired by the same jagged rocks and irrigation terraces. “I’m as fragmented as this landscape I love,” she says. “I’m never going to be whole.” During the trip after college, she began wrapping some of her canvases in prisons of wire.
For the last two years Insuaste has taught art classes at Association House. The not-for-profit social-services organization recently moved into a former hospital, where she wants to work with kids to create sculptures throughout the building. “We’re trying to get rid of that hospital feel,” she says, “and claim the space for our own.”
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