Bio

Life in Puerto Rico

I was born in 1979 in Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island that, for centuries, has been the stage of invasions, colonisation, migration, and the continuous cultural changes resulting from these.

I grew up on the Central Mountain Range of the island, in a town called Naranjito, located 700 hundred meters above the sea level. The Puerto Rican geographic position, constantly exposed to the brutal forces of hurricanes and earthquakes, has been crucial for the development of my subjectivity.

Spanish is my first language, the one spoken among friends and family, while English became the language imposed by our colonial status under the United States of America. Therefore, my childhood memories are a potpourri of messages fluctuating between the importance of the connection with my Jibaro roots (a culture of people from the mountainous area, based in self-subsistence and resilience), and the American Dream messages that arrived through radio and television, during the Eighties and Nineties.

New Beginnings

In the year 2009, at 29 years old, I left Puerto Rico searching for new perspectives. I lived for one and a half year in the city of Shanghai, in China. During this period I discovered a strong attraction for the ceramic medium and its particular way to tell stories that begin from the specificity of natural resources available to each maker.

Later, in 2011, I moved to Italy, choosing a small town called Vaiano, located on the Tuscan-Emilian Apennine, as my new home. From here I started a new journey, learning Italian and ceramic techniques simultaneously, and setting my studio next to the river Bisenzio.

The Art that followed

The evolution of my work until today reflects a particular affection towards the vessel as an art form. I approach my creations as tactile diary-pages of thoughts and emotions, where my queries about identity take form into clay. For this reason, I prefer to conceive and shape my pieces intuitively, since the results often provide unexpected answers to my conundrums.

For the surfaces of my work I adopt a more intentional approach, experimenting with glazes that aim to emulate the impact of environmental forces into a vessel. The element of color is something that I’ve incorporated progressively over time, and has more to do with the need to communicate emotions than following rules of design.