Rebeca Romero: After the Sun / 20 March - 17 May 2025
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The Sower, 2025. 3d printed clay, plant based plastic, oak. Framed: 79 x 54.5 x 5.5 cm

Kawra, 2024. Copper Composite HTPLA, mild steel. 8 x 40 x 6 cm.

Journey: Rooting, Seedling, Fruiting, Flourishing, 2025. Four ripstop and reflective fabric textiles on walnut dowel.

Gathering, 2025. Mirrored steel, fired earthenware, hardware. 90 x 166 cm (overall dimensions variable).

Score for three winds, 2025. Shell, pewter. 12 x 12.5 cm.

Codex II: Winter Solstice, 2024. UV print on aluminium composite, MDF, lacquer. 75 x 53 cm.

Copperfield is pleased to present Rebeca Romero's first solo show with the gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a text written by Gisselle Girón Casas, curator at the ESCALA Collection. 
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“Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.” - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986 

'After the Sun presents Rebeca Romero’s ongoing exploration of speculative artefacts that merge Indigenous American technologies with contemporary fabrication techniques. By removing and disavowing artefacts from the confines of history and museums and rekindling them in fiction, Rebeca constructs an alternative future where a fictional revolutionary civilisation thrives. 
 
To construct the myth of After the Sun, Rebeca draws on the story of Andean women who resisted colonial evangelisation. They escaped to the highlands, forging their ideology and developing methods to protect their culture, philosophy, and origin stories. Rebeca asks: what if these women had succeeded in establishing a new matriarchy, a powerful reclamation of the worship of the sun and moon?  

Rebeca introduces us to the Sower, a feminised entity depicted playing Kawra, a ceremonial horn inspired by the zoomorphic trumpets of the Mochica civilisation in what is now Northern Peru. She embodies a high priestess who studies celestial movements to guide agricultural rituals, reinforcing a culture of care and kinship with nature. She emerges as a heroic figure, immortalised and resisting neglect, taking the shape of a reconstructed wall relief. 

The exhibition’s material and conceptual foundation revolves around stargazing, weaving, and sowing, as technologies and as metaphors for interwoven temporalities and the potential to rekindle our relationship with the earth. Spindle whorls, ubiquitous in archaeological collections, take on new meaning in Gathering, where they link seven mirrored stainless-steel stars in a structure reminiscent of rosary beads. The work references the Seven Sisters, a star cluster central to myths of celestial transformation. 

Musical technologies further enrich the exhibition’s speculative world-building. The mythic trumpets Katari, Kawra, and Uturunku function both as ritual instruments and as amplifiers of ancestral voices. The Sower immortalised playing her trustworthy Kawra, reclaims sound as an act of defiance against historical erasure. Meanwhile, heraldic flags honour plant and root life, emphasising an ethos of ecological harmony. Gathering and the Sower assert these women as timeless heroic figures. 

In an era where capitalist and colonial structures increasingly monopolise utopia, Rebeca’s speculative artefacts offer an urgent counter-narrative, a vision of resistance, resilience, and the enduring power of myth. The exhibition embodies a heartfelt collective urgency for science fiction novels of resistance strategies, and alternative ways to live and embrace life. 

Through fiction, speculative storytelling devices, and myth-making, she urges us to rethink and re-establish our true relationship with the universe. After the Sun reminds us that there are still many stories to be told, seeds to be gathered, and songs to be sung. The eternal search does not end here - it begins anew.'

- Gisselle Girón Casas 

An extended essay about After the Sun is available here.


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Runs weekly, Wed - Sat, 12 - 6pm until 17 May 2025
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Rebeca Romero


Rebeca Romero's practice spans sculpture, textiles, writing, sound and performance. She creates objects, texts and installations that challenge the dominant historical narrative of the clash between Indigenous and European cultures. Often combining Pre-Columbian iconography with advanced scanning and printing technologies and materials ranging from clay to plastic, her works swing drastically between the past and an alternate future. Online museum archives become an excavation ground for the collection of data, that she later recontextualizes, reassembles and re-presents. With a focus on new materialities, processes of production and collaboration between artist and machine, her work proposes a further re-understanding of hegemonic notions of intelligence, technology and knowledge.

Romero has recently been awarded the OGR Prize 2023 for her work Semilla SAGRADA. The work has been acquired by Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, remaining on loan to OGR Torino in its physical and digital versions. Other recent acquisitions include KADIST Collection, ESCALA Collection (The Essex Collection of Art from Latin America) and S. Davíðsdóttir.

Recent projects include: Cosmotechnics, FACT Liverpool (2025); Intension (the concept 'dog' encapsulates its 'dogness'), Copperfield, London (2024); InBetween: A Latinx Takeover, V&A East, London (2024); Giorni Felici, Palazzo Dandolo Parisi, Venice (IT, 2024); Holding Cosmic Dust, Corinium Museum, Cirencester (UK, 2024);
​Trinta/Treinta/Thirty years of the Essex collection of Art from Latin America, ESCALA (UK, 2023); Kenophobic Pantomimes, Below Grand, New York (USA, 2023).

Romero has been featured in the Phaidon publication Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now (2023), and in Sun Dreams: Art Mirages in Latin America, published by Act Editora in 2024. 

For Romero's full CV please click here.