Ocean Minutes Away Shapes Osterling’s New Glass Works

Macarena Rojas Osterling says returning to Lima shifted her practice: the Pacific is five minutes away, and it “infiltrated” the newer work. In this interview, she connects ADHD and the chaos of motherhood to her studio logic—fragile collages, waterlike glass

For Macarena Rojas Osterling, the return to Peru didn’t arrive as a clean reset. She describes it more like a slow re-entry, the kind you feel in your bones.

“I was based in the UK for many years — I did my master’s at the RCA. ” she says. and adds that she still feels as if she’s “only just returned home.” What she treasures most in Lima is not an institution or an itinerary. but something immediate: “having the Pacific Ocean five minutes away from me.” She talks about it the way artists talk about weather—quietly. insistently. “In many ways, I think the ocean completely infiltrated the newer works.”.

That proximity shows up, she argues, in the way her newer pieces behave. The glass sculptures look pristine—“pristine. almost clinically clean — no scratches. no visible chaos”—and yet she insists the process is the opposite of control. “Even when I’m trying to extract or hold a very specific gesture of water. the making process involves surrender and unpredictability.” The ocean is there twice: in the subject. and in the studio’s refusal to be fully mastered.

The same contradiction carries into her collage paintings. She points to traces that can’t be polished away: “sand. salt. erosion. water damage.” The papers. she says. “almost feel as if they’ve been submerged in the ocean for years. ” and she’s drawn to the “fragility” that comes from that kind of exposure.

Rojas Osterling’s pathway into art runs through several academic pivots. She was born in 1985 in Lima, Peru. She studied Architecture at the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas and then transferred to the Communications Department. where she graduated in 2009. In 2012, she did the General Studies in Photography Program at the International Center of Photography in New York. Seven years later, in 2017, she received her Masters in Fine Arts at The Royal College of Art in London.

Since then, her work has moved across institutions and geographies. It has been exhibited in Black Box Projects Cromwell Place London (2022). Crisis Galería Lima (2019). Art Lima (2018). Museo AMANO Lima (2018). Camden Arts Center London (2017). Edinburgh College of Art (2016). Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Lima (2016). ArtBo Bogotá (2016). Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Santiago de Chile (2014). Wu Galería (2014-2015). International Center of Photography New York (2012). and Triskelion Arts New York (2013). among other public and privately held exhibitions. She lives and works in Lima.

Right now, her work is part of a group exhibition in London. Her work can currently be viewed in Look How Brightly. a group exhibition at London’s Britannia Row curated by Jenn Ellis and Alex Mills. The show brings together artists whose practices interrogate “questions of identity, absence and presence, fragmentation, and transcendence.”.

The tension between control and surrender isn’t only about materials. It’s also about the mind she brings to the page—especially when she talks about ADHD and the emotional overload she associates with motherhood.

“Motherhood was a difficult experience to process. ” she says. “especially with a brain like mine. which really struggles to compress information into simple conclusions.” She describes her thinking as not linear: “My mind doesn’t work in straight lines — everything becomes slightly labyrinthine. slightly contradictory. I tend to see things in shades of grey.”.

She also talks about the pressure she felt to present her inner life as something more “politically urgent or externally important,” referencing what she calls the “stereotypical ‘Latin American artist complex’.” For a while, she felt guilty making work rooted in her “own inner life.”

But she insists art can’t be assembled only from research. “I’m a very instinctive and honest artist. I don’t really know how to make work about subjects that don’t genuinely belong to me emotionally.” The turning point arrives when she connects private experience to shared reality: “The personal isn’t isolated from the collective.” Speaking about motherhood. ADHD. chaos. fragmentation—it becomes. in her words. “the most natural thing I could make work about.”.

That idea of the private becoming visible is threaded through how she builds her surfaces. “I love how your art embeds everyday fragments like grocery lists, notes or your children’s writing,” the interviewer observes, and Rojas Osterling answers with a clear sense of what those scraps contain.

“They’re traces of a very specific moment in time. ” she says. listing the everyday items she reintroduces into the work: “Grocery lists. children’s notes. ticket stubs. reminders.” They may look banal. but she frames them as part of a psychological map: “actually part of the psychological landscape I was living inside of.” For her. they reflect the day-to-day reality of a mother’s brain where “everything is happening simultaneously.”.

In her studio, domestic life isn’t background texture—it’s structure. “You’re trying to work, parent, organise, remember, survive emotionally… all at once.” And she says that’s why the boundaries collapse: “The boundaries between creative life and domestic life completely collapse.”

She admits the idea resonates beyond her own household. “I think many mothers probably experience this mentally — corporate mothers answering emails while managing ten invisible layers of thought at the same time,” she says, but in her work that invisible load becomes visible and exposed.

Some of her drawings, she adds, were made while navigating separation, moving countries, midlife, exhaustion, and transformation. The resulting works become “accumulations of thought, memory, anxiety, logistics, affection, language… all compressed into one surface.”

Rojas Osterling wants that compression to stay raw. “I want the work to remain immediate, and deeply connected to the moment I’m living through.” Even ordinary experiences, she says, can “carry enormous emotional weight.”

Her drawing process also carries a distinct method. She brings up works including Shapes of the Whitewater III by Macarena Rojas Osterling. 2026. described as “Drawing on Paper 45 x 71.5 inches (114.3 × 181.6 cm) Framed in stained wood. optium.” She also references La Muna. and another titled La Muna II by Macarena Rojas Osterling. 2026. described as “Drawing on Paper 18×24 inches (46×61 cm) Framed in stained wood. optium.” (The piece list in her interview also includes photo credits: “Photo Credit: Claire Esparros” and “Photo Credit Ian Tong. ” and an “Installation view of In The White Water at Praxis. May 7-July 10. 2026. ” also credited to Ian Tong.).

The mind she maps is sometimes mistaken for something else. She says people get confused by her drawings: “Some think they’re textiles or thread rather than drawings.” She attributes that misreading to repetition and layered building that resembles weaving. and she says her own attraction to “systems. sequencing. repetition. mapping. and structure” is tied to growing up around instability.

Here, the story returns to Peru and to history. She points to a childhood shaped by unstable conditions: “There was terrorism, hyperinflation, unpredictability. You never really knew what was coming next. economically or emotionally.” Her impulse toward grids and data-like structures. she says. can be understood as a response—an attention to “systems that can organise. predict. measure. or hold experience together.”.

And yet she doesn’t frame it as cold engineering. “What interests me is that this impulse coexists with a very emotional and intuitive practice.”

That mixture also reshaped her education. She says she began embracing chaos during her MFA. At that point. she realized it was “impossible to operate under the same conditions as many of my peers.” She was “a very young mother. ” and she couldn’t stay through every lecture. attend every opening. or constantly socialise inside the art-world ecosystem because “I had a child waiting for me at home.”.

At first, it felt like limitation and “even a kind of failure.” Then she understood art wasn’t optional: “I’ve never really known myself without making work.” So she absorbed her life into the practice: “my son, exhaustion, fragmentation, interruptions, emotional overload, unfinished thoughts.”

At some point, she stopped seeing interruptions as obstacles. “They actually were the work.”

She also links motherhood to a shift in honesty. “Before that. I still felt pressure to speak about subjects that perhaps seemed more intellectually or politically legitimate.” After becoming a mother. she says it became clear that “experiences closest to us can also contain enormous complexity and universality.”.

As her children grew older, she says the work evolved “beyond motherhood itself into broader emotional experiences,” but the “core idea remains the same.” The more honestly she speaks about inner life, she says, the more other people recognise themselves inside the work.

The same sensibility shows up in her choice of materials. She talks about glass as a way to give water physical credibility.

“I had been wanting to portray water for a very long time. ” she says. adding that the drawings had “certain limitations in terms of capturing that physicality.” Glass let her hold gestures of water “in a much more spontaneous way.” She calls it unexpected too: “it was my first time working with the material.”.

She says many viewers interpret the sculptures as “ice fragments or frozen water formations.” Even when they don’t consciously connect the pieces to the ocean, she believes people still “emotionally connect the works back to water,” and she calls that meaningful.

Glass also functions, she says, as relief from drawing’s density. “The drawings are psychologically dens.” Sometimes she needs a break from that intensity herself. which is why she began making collage works and “more spatial pieces.” “The glass introduces silence and pause into the practice while still speaking about fragility and instability.”.

She continues to draw nourishment from other creative fields. Asked which exhibitions or artists have recently fed her, she names Jacqueline Qiu and Elise Peroi. She says both are weavers, and that “you can feel the final work is very intuitive, and the thread has a life of its own.”

Even her drawing practices, she says, can be mistaken for textiles. That’s part of her attraction to weaving as a medium.

Reading, she adds, sustains her creatively as well. “Recently I’ve been very immersed in the writing of Rachel Cusk.” She says she’s “deeply drawn to confessional literature” and to writers who can transform emotional experiences—especially around relationships. identity. motherhood. or separation—“into something intellectually sharp but still vulnerable.”.

She connects strongly to “middle aged female writers,” arguing that “we are all going through a bit the same.”

If there is a single thread connecting her newest glass works to her drawings stitched from grocery lists. it’s her insistence that chaos doesn’t only disrupt—it can also generate meaning. Returning home to Lima gives her a literal source of water and light. Living with ADHD and raising children gives her the language of fragments, contradictions, and overwhelmed circuitry. In the studio. she turns that instability into structure—then lets the ocean and the materials keep slipping out of the grid.

Macarena Rojas Osterling Lima art Pacific Ocean glass sculptures drawing on paper collage paintings ADHD motherhood contemporary art Look How Brightly Britannia Row Jenn Ellis Alex Mills Rachel Cusk Jacqueline Qiu Elise Peroi