Hyattsville, MD
I am a ceramic artist based in the Gateway Arts District of Hyattsville, MD, where I maintain a full-time studio practice. My work explores themes of materiality, place, and belonging, using wild clays and local materials to create both functional tableware and ceramic objets d’art. My aesthetic is rooted in my Ecuadorian heritage and the pre-Columbian folk art that filled my childhood home. That early exposure shaped my understanding of ceramics. These utilitarian objects—bowls, figurines, cooking vessels—were more than functional; they carried cultural memory, embodied spiritual belief, and held space for everyday ritual.
I carry that lineage forward by working with mid-Atlantic wild clays that I dig and process by hand. These clays—dug from riverbanks, hillsides, and construction sites—bring the land into the work and embed a sense of place into each form. I use locally sourced glaze materials like wood ash, feldspar, and crushed rock. These choices are intentional: they reduce reliance on extractive industrial systems and root my practice in principles of deep ecology. My firing processes—both oxidation and reduction—include opportunities for wood firing, which I approach as a communal act of labor and fellowship.
My practice moves between function and sculpture, utility and symbolism. Whether it’s a mug or a vessel-figure, I’m always thinking about how form can speak to cultural memory, migration, and survival. One such work—a figurative ceramic vessel titled Diosa Guerrera ("Seguimos Aqui")—was born from grief and defiance of increasing anti-immigrant, nativist rhetoric in the United States. The diosa is a warrior vessel: her body is a container, her stance declarative, her presence unyielding. Drawing from the tradition of female effigy vessels found across pre-Columbian cultures, she embodies ancestral power, diasporic resilience, and the sacred role of women as carriers of lineage. Through her, I sought to reclaim and reassert immigrant presence as essential to the American story.
My creative process is intuitive and research-based. I begin with the material—often letting the clay dictate the form—and layer meaning through form, texture, and surface. My training in sociolinguistics and anthropology (Georgetown University, MA; Oberlin College, BA) informs how I understand objects as carriers of meaning. To me, ceramics is a cultural language—materially rich, historically resonant, and deeply personal. Clay is a timekeeper, a storyteller, and a collaborator. I use it to ask questions: What do we inherit? What do we carry forward? What does it mean to belong?
