Growing up in Puerto Rico, I was immersed in a culture alive with history, tradition, and contradictions. The island is a place where beauty and struggle live side by side, where the rhythm of tradition beats against the undercurrent of its colonial history. My work reflects that tension: a deep connection to heritage as a living, breathing force, a language of lineage, and an equally persistent urge to question its confines.
The body is at the center of everything I do. It is both subject and medium, a map and a mirror, carrying the weight of its own history while offering a stage for universal themes to unfold in new or forgotten ways. There is a kind of urgency in sculpting the figure—its scale, its placement, its surfaces—all of it building and experience that feels as much lived as observed. Through these forms, grounded in my inherited cultural symbology, I try to hold on to seismic moments that shift the ground beneath me, giving shape to the ephemeral, preserving not just memories but the sensations they leave behind.
Sculpting is, for me, an act of preservation and discovery. When I sculpt my daughter’s body I am marking a moment in time and a version of her that will never again be. And at the same time I am collaborating with some unknown force or muse to give rise a unique expression beyond simple documentation. Clay is the perfect ally in this, an ancient, generous instigator of creativity, connection, and transformation, always ready to take on the imprint of human intention and emotion yet with its own voice and discoveries to unearth. I have been grateful for this material, daily, throughout decades.
In the end, I make these figures not to provide answers but to ask questions-about identity, about memory, about the places and stories that shape us. Each curve and crease carries the weight of my own culture, the complexities of being Puerto Rican, but also something much more universal. In the end, the body becomes a kind of bridge, connecting what is specific and personal to what is shared and enduring.