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Maria Ruiz (Maria Queiroga) is a Brazilian-born visual artist based in Toronto whose practice investigates land memory, migration, and spiritual relationships with the natural world through material-based processes. Working across sculpture, installation, painting, photography, and video, she engages organic and ecological materials as active collaborators rather than passive mediums.
Rooted in ancestral knowledge and lived experience across territories, Ruiz explores how cultural memory persists through landscape, matter, and gesture. Gathering branches, soil, sand, and natural remnants from the environments she inhabits, her work examines the ways land holds traces of presence, displacement, and belonging.
During her residency at MOTHRA Artist Residency on the Toronto Islands, she initiated an ongoing investigation into ecological listening and material memory, treating the earth as archive, witness, and living partner in the artistic process.
Ruiz’s practice positions art as an act of care, reverence, and relational awareness, inviting viewers to encounter nature not as representation but as embodied experience.