Karla García
Artist

My work begins with the land. I grew up between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, where the desert’s forms, stories, and quiet expansiveness shaped how I understand home and belonging. The landscape I return to, whether through clay, memory, or research, is not a backdrop but an active participant. It holds movement, migration, myth, poetry, and the stories of my family. 

 

Ceramics is my primary language because clay remembers. I often use clay that has traveled with me across borders and projects, material that has absorbed time, touch, and history. Through coil-built and pinched cactus forms and grasses, my installations create their own ecosystems. I explore how land becomes an archive: one that preserves lived experience but also opens into mythic space. My surfaces carry washes of cobalt, manganese, and iron, suspended glazes, and layered textures that reflect desert twilight, geological time, and the quiet animacy of the natural world.

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My practice is guided by a constellation of influences: Mexican mythology, Catholic ritual, Mesoamerican cosmologies, and ecofeminist thought such as the writings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. I am drawn to stories where plants, deities, and celestial bodies move with agency. Where the relationship between humans and the natural world feels reciprocal rather than extractive. These narratives help me imagine landscapes as living intelligences and allow my sculptures to exist somewhere between object, body, and being.

 

Each installation becomes a terrain of its own with sculptures placed on the floor as if emerging from the ground, clusters of grasses acting as connective tissue, and larger forms standing as guardians, conduits, or dream spaces. I think of these environments as thresholds where myth and the present moment come together. A place where personal and collective memory can coexist. The work is about grounding and transformation. How we carry land within us, and how land carries us in return.

 

Over time, my sculptures have responded to their ephemeral unfired state that links each object to the land itself. Recently, they have been shaped by fire and glazes that respond to poetry, myths, and cosmology.  My installations become desert ecologies informed by the spiritual gestures of everyday life. A simple act of ritual. Each coil or pinched gesture becomes a a cactus or grass cluster creating a ritual, a story, a dream, a poem that builds a landscape. My installations are my way of listening to the desert, to myth, to ancestry, to the women before me, and to the quiet landscapes that connect the land and sky.