Jasmine Haniff visited Monica Perez in her London studio to learn about wool, traces of empire, and Indigenous erasure in the Uruguayan artist’s work.

When Uruguayan artist Monica Perez moved from Los Angeles to London to undertake an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art, she began to investigate the obscured histories that connected her new city with her country of birth. In her latest project COST, developed during her MA studies, she unravels the thread between England and Uruguay, exploring the raw wool trade and the displacement and erasure of Indigenous communities. 

In the 19th century, England’s wool trade was thriving. As wool traders sought to expand, raw wool was transformed into a colonial commodity. Massive sheep farms were established by English settler colonialists in territories across the globe, predominantly in Australia and New Zealand, but also in the Southern Cone of South America. In the 1800s, wool traders transformed Uruguay’s pampas into vast sheep pastures. These farms required large tracts of land, which was often violently seized from Indigenous communities, displacing them and restructuring local economies to serve the British textile industry. COST is a response to this lesser known chapter of history. 

In her artist statement, Perez writes:

I had the chance to visit Perez at her West London studio, where she had recently moved after completing her master’s degree. There, I encountered three of her wool sculptures that form part of the COST collection, suspended from the ceiling by what appeared to be butcher’s hooks. Composed of raw materials including wool, wax, mud, hair, and oil, Perez’s works exude a raw, tactile quality. There is a weightiness and vitality to the pieces, and a sense that the materials themselves carry layers of memory, history, and meaning. 

Next to the sculptures, Perez has arranged a collection of found objects from Uruguay, the Thames Path, and other resonant locations, each coated in a protective layer of wax. These objects form a kind of mini archive, with each artifact tied to specific times and places. Rootedness, time, and memory are key concepts in Perez’s work, reflecting her personal diasporic journey. She left Uruguay at the age of eight and moved to Los Angeles, an experience that continues to shape her artistic perspective. 

She shares how deeply the material itself resonated with her: ‘It was interesting to be in the work in such a visceral way. [The wool] smelled a certain way. Not only did it have its own traces of where it came from, which farm, but it also had lanolin, and everything else. I would receive these bags of wool, and I would just get these crazy emotions with it.’

At first, Perez tried to track down farms with real links to South America through the colonial wool trade, but it proved more difficult than expected. ‘I was really interested in tracking the wool that was actually picked from South America to feed the wool trade here. So I was tracking that, but I wasn’t finding exactly that. I thought it was interesting that I felt like I had to find a particular breed. But then I felt like I should use all the breeds. There was imperfection in this extraction.’

For Perez, the material artworks she creates almost serve as ‘extractions’ of the broader research project: ‘It’s as though, just like the original material was once extracted, something is being drawn out of the project too — and what’s left behind are bones, relics, and artefacts washed up from the sea.’

The titles of the works in COST reinforce the project’s archival logic. COST.176 refers to the number of Indigenous languages lost across South America, while COST.89% points to the proportion of Uruguay’s population that now self-identifies as white. As Perez explains, each piece is not assigned a conventional ‘cost’ or price. Instead, it embodies a ‘specific historical cost’. Collectively, the works function as a ledger, documenting and resisting the erasure of Indigenous histories and the displacement of people under the colonial wool trade.

This colonial violence is certainly reflected in Perez’s art. The dark shades of red and black allude to the violence enacted on people and animals alike, and many of the sculptures evoke the idea of meat hanging from a hook in a butcher’s shop or abattoir. Yet, alongside this imagery of violence, the works carry a profound sense of care. The wool in the sculptures brings a softness, and each material is so carefully selected. Nothing is accidental. 

‘When I began weaving together history, theory, and Indigenous practices, they worked like apertures, opening onto one another and changing what came into focus. Rather than looking for answers, I followed a kind of breadcrumb trail of possibilities and questions, and the overlaps created a beautifully porous space that kept allowing the work to emerge. I found myself in this strange, connected flow — where making and thinking were no longer separate. Everything I picked up from my library seemed to be part of that unfolding, as if it had been guiding the work into being.’

For Perez, creating this work is an attempt to unravel the story, a way to understand it. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the rhizome, which describes knowledge and experience as interconnected and rootlike, rather than linear, her collection resists a single narrative. There is no one way to move through or interpret the work; instead, it shifts and evolves depending on its audience and environment.

Catch Monica’s work in The Diasporic Archive, a group show organised by 2025 RCA graduate artists and curators with diasporic and postcolonial identities. 25–27 September 2025 at The Old Waiting Room, Peckham Rye, London. The exhibition foregrounds urgent, personal narratives of migration, displacement, inherited trauma, and the politics of belonging – framing art- and exhibition-making as acts of catharsis and care that foster togetherness. The Old Waiting Room, Peckham Rye Station, Station Way, Peckham, London SE15 4RX.