La Techxicana Studio is the natural dyeing studio of Sarah Gonzales Busse creating fine art editions and fine home collections. From foraging local plants and trees, daily collecting kitchen compost scraps for dye, working with traditional dyes, and combing local thrift or reuse centers, I create colorful, patterned, and printed narratives. My works are inspired by nature, seasons, and myth, guiding my practice into Tejana futurism, as I call it. I embrace the home collections being small gestures, nudges toward the intentional sustainable living of true circular economies, within much larger narratives that just remind you to keep both awake and hopeful. Call whoever brings you peace. Scheme with your support systems. Seek out what you don’t understand and ask why, again. Remember that our lives feel better offline when we hand a friend we owe an apology our sincere presence and gifts of resistance.

Sarah Gonzales Busse (La Sirena de La Techxicana Studio) is a Generation X artist, activist, Tejana futurist, advocate, and mother of three (not including pets and wannabe adoptees), whose work focuses on individuals as signifiers and paradoxes within the human condition. She is drawn specifically to how, individually and collectively, we color or distort our natural and cultural geographies, embody and inhabit narrative histories, internalize generational traumas, and recreate cosmological patterns. Her work often features women and children as primary messengers and receivers within spare or abstracted landscapes.

Her materials and approaches have ranged from painting, drawing, and sculpture, to more recently working with natural dyes and traditional methods on paper, print, and textile works and installations, as she reacts to being an artist and mother in these times of evolving cultural narratives, performative digital living, and really dire global climate and economic uncertainties.

The natural dying processes used to create her textile works bring attention to the environmental impacts of the material choices and techniques used by artists creating art in a time of uncertain climate change, water scarcity, and global effluent pollution. These works blend traditional natural dyes and locally sourced dyes bridging time, trade, and culture. The dyeing processes also bring attention to how water, a precious resource in San Antonio, can be part of creating sustainable closed loops that help regenerate, or at least not damage, our natural environment. The remnants of past series or temporary installations get recontextualized into new works and narratives, carried forward to build and memorialize.

Born and currently based with her family in San Antonio, TX, her work and practice is also influenced by time spent living in Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Peloponnese.