"My artistic practice is based on the construction of small-scale architectures, transforming into haptic scale that which we can only perceive from a distance."
Jessica Briceño Cisneros was born in Caracas, raised in Quito, and migrated to Chile as a teenager — a trajectory that informs the geographical and emotional layers of her work. She is a visual artist, sculptor, and educator. She holds a BA in Visual Arts from Universidad Diego Portales and an MA in Arts with a mention in Art Theory and History from Universidad de Chile. Her practice interrogates traditional notions of monumentality through sculpture, exploring how architecture—particularly Latin American modernism—has been imposed, translated, and reinterpreted across the Global South.
Briceño Cisneros explores the intersection of art, architecture, nature, and identity, with a persistent focus on water as a resource, symbol, and architectural element. Water tanks appear recurrently in her work as sculptural objects and conceptual studies. She investigates the physical properties of materials—such as flotation, weight, and balance—to develop works that blend poetic sensitivity with technical inquiry, nostalgia with play.
Her recent pieces incorporate music and text as performative layers, whether through written words embedded in sculptures or participatory actions. A significant part of her work is site-specific, developed in direct dialogue with its surroundings, territory, and local material culture.
As an educator, she has worked in sculpture and architecture, addressing vernacular materialities and knowledge systems in contemporary artistic production.
In 2025, she will participate in the PADA residency program in Portugal and carry out her first Chilean National Art Creation Fund project. She has been an international resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019, USA), Sculpture Space (2018, NY), and was awarded the Mobility Fund by the Dutch Prince Claus Fund (2018). Her work has been exhibited in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, and is part of public and private collections across the Americas.
Jessica Briceño Cisneros lives and works in Santiago, Chile.