Artist Statement
My practice follows my obsession with materials such as clay and obsidian, color language, physicality, and reflections. I create and look for artifacts that do not offer answers but reflect questions back to us. I move towards opacity and density as resistance from the western idea that everything should be grasped and known. These artifacts are also the result of ideas and experiences around language, identity and self-reflection. As a transnational artist, the ability to move from one language to another is crucial and illuminates the centrality of change within the human experience. In my own life, I have been fascinated by the physical transformations occurring as I adopted English as my primary language for daily use. My curiosity has led me to explore this phenomenon through material. For example, glaze is a surface material, it speaks a very specific language as the skin of the object. When it is made to be the structure which holds everything together, the artifact itself, we discover a material with a new sentience and a new physicality.
What I make and how I look at it is deeply informed by my family and my context as a Latin American. Both my parents are archeologists who dedicated their lives to deciphering the remnants of our past. Through this lens, I see the object as survival - objects with a sense of permanence and timelessness. My life has been filled with artifacts from my ancestors, belonging to religious and life rituals, and they are present in my making through form. The materials I use embody the natural vulnerability that exists within all of us, and the tension between ephemerality and endurance.
