Sara Flores Brings Amazonian Geometry to White Cube Bermondsey

As contemporary art deepens its engagement with ancestral knowledge, ecological urgency, and the ethics of care, the work of Sara Flores offers something quietly transformative. Born in 1950 in Tambomayo, in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, Flores is a master of Kené—a sacred, matrilineal visual language practiced by the Shipibo-Conibo people. Rooted in the verb kéenti, meaning to love or care for, Kené is far more than ornament: it is a philosophy of interconnectedness, reciprocity, and healing.

Flores’s designs are not drafted but received—emerging in dreams, appearing on the thread of a mosquito net, or revealed in the subtle intelligence of plants and their spirits. As a child, she was apprenticed by her mother, who would press leaves against her eyelids to help her “better receive the designs.” This visionary dimension, known as shinan, is believed to be innate—balanced by menin, the technical mastery required to render each pattern freehand, without preparatory sketches. Together, they form the dual pillars of Flores’s practice.

With “Bakish Mai,” her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, Flores brings her visionary textile paintings—and her debut film Non Nete (A Flag for the Shipibo Nation)—to White Cube Bermondsey (9 July–7 September 2025). In works dyed with pigments drawn from native trees, vines, and riverbed clay, she maps a living cosmology of land, memory, resistance, and care. Guided by shinan, Kené becomes both design and lifeforce: an aesthetic philosophy passed from mother to daughter, from forest to cloth.

In the conversation that follows, conducted for Whitewall ahead of the exhibition’s opening, Flores reflects on the origins of her visionary process, the ethics of reciprocity in her practice, and how Kené embodies and transmits a distinctly Shipibo-Conibo way of seeing—through line, rhythm, and the living intelligence of the forest.

An Artist Practicing Spiritual Guidance

WHITEWALL: Your work transmits a lineage of Kené design that is not only visual but spiritual, philosophical, and ecological. How do you experience the moment when a design first comes to you—do you see it as memory, vision, or revelation? 

SARA FLORES: Sometimes certain patterns, I cannot dismiss from my mind. I go to sleep, I wake up in the morning and see them forming on the thread of the mosquito net. I close my eyes and keep on seeing them. They come to me in dreams.

“I close my eyes and keep on seeing them,”

Sara Flores

WW: The Shipibo concept of shinan—the inner vision or spiritual insight that guides the hand— seems essential to your process. How do you distinguish between the learned discipline of menin and the intuitive flow of shinan in your daily practice? 

SF: Menin is the skill of doing good paintwork without mistakes or stains. It’s the craft side of things. Shinan is the visionary imagination, but the word also refers to strength, energy, awakeness, intelligence, a good memory, inventiveness, spiritual presence, and, indeed, the very essence of life—for to die in the Shipibo language translates shinan-nanqui (the thinking flees).

Sara Flores and a Shifting Palette of Resistance

WW: In “Bakish Mai,” you debut your first film work. What inspired this new medium, and how does the image of your textile as a flag relate to the idea of Indigenous sovereignty and “a nation of our own,” as the title Non Nete suggests? 

SF: I have been involved in a film production for the past two years or so. The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs by Èlia Gasull Balada and Matteo Norzi is a feature documentary about my life story, set to premiere next year. By spending a lot of time on set with my filmmaker friends, I was exposed to this new medium and we’ve started to play around. I liked the idea of giving life to my painting as a flag waving by the wind of a soft melody. The music is the recording of a shaman blowing good intentions into an ayahuasca bottle at the beginning of the journey. We, the Shipibo, have also begun a journey toward self-determination and autonomy as an Indigenous Nation. My banner has the ambition to help bring my people together in this struggle.

WW: Many of your materials are derived from plants and trees that hold ancestral and medicinal significance. How does your relationship with the Amazonian ecosystem shape the ethics of your artmaking, especially in the context of ongoing environmental degradation? 

SF: I used to make a blueish tint from the leaves of a small tree. There are no more of those around here. Now I would need to bring them from further and further away, because the loggers are finishing the plants. They kill the trees and they cut them down to make timber; and the materials that I use are running out. Now I would have to walk far to seek. Today my art practice becomes a form of territorial resistance. This is true also in a practical way, thanks to my collaboration with The Shipibo Conibo Center.

The Emotional Power of Kené

WW: You’ve spoken of Kené as being passed from mother to daughter, as a kind of sacred inheritance. What does it mean to you to now work alongside your daughters, and how do you envision this intergenerational transmission continuing into the future? 

SF: There will always be Kené. It will continue to reinvent itself through the minds of our mothers and daughters.

WW: There’s a strong philosophical thread in your practice—the idea that Kené can reorder visual and spiritual imbalance. Do you see your art as a form of healing? And if so, what kinds of healing does our world need most today? 

SF: The people who buy my work hang it there in the room where they sleep. They tell me it makes them feel good. So yes, it must work as a medicine somehow—a design-medicine.

“So yes, it must work as a medicine somehow—a design-medicine,”

Sara Flores

WW: “Bakish Mai” translates to “Land of Yesterday and Tomorrow.” How do you see the past and the future weaving together in your work—and what kind of future do you hope your art might help bring about, both for the Shipibo-Conibo and for a wider world? 

SF: “Bakish Mai” is the name of a school project with a focus on the arts, plants, political and legal education we have started in the Peruvian Amazon. It’s a “multiversity” to help fill the gap in the intergenerational transmission of Indigenous knowledge and technologies in a moment in which traditional methods no longer work as they used to. The ancestral past is to inform a more sustainable future within our people and beyond.

WW: As your work travels across geographies—from the Amazon to Lima, Paris to London—what has stayed with you most about how people respond to Kené? Have any encounters or interpretations surprised or touched you deeply? 

SF: So many things! I will never forget what happened to the great American artist and poet, my friend Julie Ezelle-Patton, the first time she entered my show. She channeled very strong emotions—crying and laughing—and I believe she started having powerful visions of her own.