La Pupila

Born in Colombia and based in Toronto, La Pupila works across tattooing, painting, printmaking and mural art. She tattoos at the Timeless Ink studio and paints walls under this alias, returning to a consistent set of motifs: finely drawn female faces, distorted forms and repeated floral patterns that give her compositions a dreamlike register.

Most of her public work sits in the west end of the city, around Geary Avenue, where she has painted several walls. At Dupont Street and Dufferin Street she created « La milpa » with the artist Muys, a mural of three women's faces surrounded by bean crops, honouring the resilience of Indigenous matriarchs. With the artist AlfAlfA she painted « Breaking the borders », a piece asserting the right to seek a better life regardless of nationality or paperwork.

Her practice reaches beyond Toronto, including a diptych painted with the same collaborator in the Rosemont district of Montréal. Several of her murals grow out of work with community groups, among them the skateboarding collective Sisters of Shred. Alongside the walls, the artist shows in galleries and circulates her imagery as prints and originals.