Artist Statement

My work begins with memory: the people we carry with us, the places that shape us, and the objects that become evidence of where we come from. I work primarily with ceramics because clay allows me to make memory physical. It holds fingerprints, pressure, imperfections, and evidence of the person who shaped it. For me, that makes clay deeply connected to the body, family, and inheritance.

My practice is influenced by my Mexican and Filipino heritage, my family's history of migration, and my upbringing between family traditions and San Francisco. I often return to flowers, religious imagery, family photographs, hummingbirds, rosaries, vessels, and familiar domestic objects. These symbols allow me to explore grief, spirituality, migration, women's labor, cultural memory, and intergenerational care.

Much of my work comes from thinking about the people in my family whose creativity was never formally recognized as art. I think about the knowledge carried through cooking, sewing, crocheting, gardening, decorating, working with one's hands, and creating beauty with limited resources. These practices influence the way I understand myself as an artist.

Clay also became a form of healing for me. Making requires me to slow down and physically work through experiences that can be difficult to express through language. Some of my pieces come directly from loss and grief, while others celebrate tenderness, humor, resistance, spirituality, and the everyday beauty within my community.

I create work so that our histories can take up space. Growing up, seeing the murals of San Francisco's Mission District and seeing brown people represented larger than life showed me the power of being visible. I want my work to offer that same sense of recognition. Through ceramics, I preserve pieces of family and cultural memory while creating objects that remind us that our stories, traditions, grief, joy, and ways of caring for one another are worthy of being remembered.