My work is grounded in the use of ritual as a mode of artistic practice. Through drawing, painting, and performative actions, I explore how attention, presence, and intention—core elements of ritual—can affect the one who makes at a subconscious level, while leaving a trace of that experience in the resulting work.

I’m currently developing two bodies of work: The Given Place approaches figurative drawing as a form of symbolic action, in which relational figures are given a deliberate place through sustained attention. Within this process, drawing becomes a way of engaging these relationships beyond verbal language,allowing them to be reconsidered, reconfigured, and symbolically placed within a new relational framework.

All but Thoughts is an abstract body of work developed through drawing as a ritual and somatic practice, using breath, voice, and bodily awareness. In contrast to the intentional structure of The Given Place, this work begins without a predetermined image or symbolic program, allowing the image to emerge without fixed direction. Tobón enters the act of drawing as an inquiry into what moves beneath deliberate thought, where form arises from gesture, material, and the body’s axes—as if registering an exchange between receptive and generative forces.

Across both bodies of work, the practice begins with the body and the act of making. Meaning does not precede the work, but emerges through it. I approach art as a process that allows internal states to be observed, shifted, and given form. While drawing has been central to my practice, I understand it as a point of departure for an expanding exploration across material, scale, and form.