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Canada
Sandra-Viviana Murillo-Morales (arQ RunicoS) is a Colombian-born interdisciplinary artist based in Montreal. Her work weaves together synaesthesia art, ambidextrous drawing, and paper sculpture, grounded in over 20 years of experience in environmental and urban design. With academic training in Architecture, Urban Planning, and a Master’s in Environment and Sustainability, she creates contemplative abstract art that explores the connection between nature, colour, music, and emotion, fostering well-being and supporting socio-ecological transition.
After surviving a life-threatening illness in 2020, Sandra-Viviana developed a conscious ambidextrous drawing technique informed by her colour synaesthesia and to cope with chronic pain in her hands—lasting effects of the treatments that saved her life. Her work, presented in Canada, Germany, and Colombia, reflects themes of regeneration across inner and outer landscapes. In 2024, she held her first solo exhibition, A Forest in Colour, inspired by resilient urban trees of Montreal, supported by the Conseil des arts de Montréal (CAM) and Conseil des arts et lettres du Quebec (CALQ). That same year, her drawings of tropical trees were published in a book launched at COP19 in Colombia, advancing nature-based urban solutions for the Global South. In 2025, an adapted version of A Forest in Colour was presented in Montreal’s public parks.
Her current project, La couleur sans mots, une sculpture en pleine lumière (Wordless Colour, a Sculpture in Full Light), supported by the CAM’s program for artists with disabilities and Consulate of Colombia in Montreal, follows the symbolic journey of the only hummingbird that migrates from South America to Quebec—a pollinator and a metaphor for colour, resilience, and the emotional migrations we carry. Through colour and light, she connects personal and collective memory to inspire urban stewardship and belonging.
Sandra-Viviana also leads cultural mediation workshops and received the 2022 Peggy Truscott Award from Ovarian Cancer Canada. She continues her mission as a community ambassador of Hope through art.
After surviving a life-threatening illness in 2020, Sandra-Viviana turned her career fully to the arts and developed a conscious ambidextrous drawing technique with coloured pencils and mixed media. Informed by her colour synaesthesia and adapted to cope with chronic pain in her hands — lasting effects of the treatments that saved her life — this process became the foundation of her paper art practice and her series Topo.graphies of emotions. These are crumpled, coloured tracing papers infused with recycled pigments from pencil shavings, modeled with both hands to translate the inner landscapes of her emotions and synaesthetic perception into three-dimensional form. They expand into installations and photographic studies, where they interact with natural and artificial environments to awaken contemplative experiences of sensation and imagination.
At Paper Camp – Artist Residence in Loulé, Viviana seeks to explore the sculptural potential of paper by weaving her ambidextrous drawing and photographic practice into a dialogue with place, colour, and light. This work supports the development of her current project, La couleur sans mots, une sculpture en pleine lumière (Wordless Colour, a Sculpture in Full Light), supported by the Conseil des arts de Montréal and the Consulate of Colombia in Montréal’s « Casa Colombia » program. Inspired by the symbolic journey of the only hummingbird that migrates from South America to Quebec, this project reflects both her own migration story and a metaphor for resilience, colour, and the emotional migrations we carry.
Through her participation in Paper Camp, Viviana will continue exploring temporary migration journeys as her own brief visit to Loulé and deepen her long-standing love of paper — a material that connects her architectural background with her reverence for trees as living memory. Her explorations will engage directly with the Paper Camp’s theme Self Topography on Paper, reflecting her process of translating inner journeys and lived experiences into material landscapes shaped from and with paper.
