Artist Statement

I am a ceramic artist, a teaching artist, and a healing facilitator. My practice lives precisely where craft, community, and ritual intersect.

My work begins with clay. A material that responds to my guttural need to touch, to feel, and transform. I am drawn to biomorphic forms that reference landscape, the natural world, and the female figure – organic shapes that create an interconnected story mimicking how I exist in the world. Clay in its fired permanence becomes the object through which I attempt to capture what is most transient – grief, memory, change, becoming. This is why I am drawn to wood and soda firing – the communal vigil of tending a kiln through the night, reading fire together, surrendering the work to flame and atmosphere. The kiln requires her community. My current body of work explores the torn relationship between the body and the Pachamama, between personal wound and collective healing, between what we inherit and what we choose to build.

I am Peruvian-born and Twin Cities-rooted. My practice is inseparable from the experience of displacement and belonging – building home and growing a community through sharing and exchanging our humanity, and through creating art. This is why I make in community, teach in community, and recently began to offer my work as a form of community healing. The studio is not separate from the ritual. The clay objects are not separate from the grief they hold. The vessel is not separate from what it is built to carry.

My teaching extends the ceramic practice into broader healing spaces, as all arts have the power to do. The act of making something with your hands becomes a portal where purpose can be cultivated, burdens can be released, and collective healing can happen. I believe art is medicine. I believe making things with your hands leads to self-knowledge. I believe that community is the oldest hacks to self-fulfillment. I believe our connection to the Pachamama will propel us safely into the future.

Currently, I am developing a body of work and a series of ceremonial community offerings rooted in connection to each other, connection to the land, and our shared cultural inheritance and lived experiences.