Inside The Alchemist Heart: A Guided Tour with Dafne Blanco-Sarlay

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Cost: $5.00
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Drawing from her Afro-Mexican and Jewish roots, her family’s history of migration and activism, and her lived experience as an immigrant in Canada, Dafne’s work weaves together “a juxtaposition of lived realities through a hybrid female body that embodies a multiplicity of voices.”

Inspired by the play Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project, The Alchemist Heart reflects on the pain of injustice and the beauty of resilience. The exhibition presents the heart as an alchemical vessel — a place where suffering, love, and social commitment are transformed into something precious.

This intimate tour offers a unique opportunity to hear directly from the artist about the stories, symbols, and materials behind her work.

The Alchemist Heart (Artist Statement)
My paternal grandmother descended from black slaves who escaped from Cuba to Mexico in the early 1900s. My father was a leftist activist until his death. My maternal grandparents were Jews who fled Europe and settled in Mexico in the 1930s. These diverse origins, plus my experiences as an immigrant in Canada, always inform my work, which I consider a juxtaposition of lived realities through a hybrid female body that embodies that multiplicity of voices.

Being an African-Mexican Jew, committed to social justice, the play Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project, truly speaks to me at many levels and inspires me to create this exhibit called The Alchemist Heart based on the concept of an open heart suffering because of injustice and oppression: an image of a heart open to ongoing, active loving and caring for others.

Ultimately, the heart is an alchemy lab where the transmutation from lead –pain and suffering, into precious matter happens through our active commitment to social justice, despite the personal cost of militancy for so many over the course of history.

About the Artist
Dafne Blanco-Sarlay is a multidisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, BC, originally from Mexico. Her multiethnic background, Eastern European Jewish, Afro-Caribbean, and Mexican Indigenous, deeply informs a practice rooted in migration, memory, and the layering of cultural histories. Since arriving in Canada in 1996, she has developed a body of work that explores the crossroads where cultures converge, creating visual narratives where juxtaposed realities, encompassing history and the present, take shape.

Working primarily in mixed media, Dafne builds richly textured surfaces that serve as metaphors for transcultural identity and the complexity of belonging. Her practice is also shaped by an early interest in alchemy and a guiding belief that “there are many worlds, but all exist within this one.” This vision fuels her exploration of the unseen those “manifestations of reality that coexist, that wander around us, and are waiting to be captured by the artist.”

Through ceramics, painting, and layered materials, Dafne invites viewers into these converging worlds, where time, space, and memory intertwine.
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