Mariana Mesa Caceres
Sculptural Artist
Mariana Mesa
"Geometry becomes a language for something otherwise intangible — a way of translating what I feel and perceive into something you can hold."
Artist Statement
I create because it gives my desire for expression a voice. There's so much I feel — about people, about the world around me — that doesn't always translate into words, but clay gives it a natural way to be expressed. My work is a beautiful way to describe emotion: something that doesn't usually have a shape, translated into one.I make my work using clay, primarily shaped by hand. I start by imagining the concept — the emotion I'm trying to materialize from a person or being — then sketch how that emotion translates into physical form. I play with compositions on paper, working out whether the shapes are structurally possible, then choose colors that reflect the emotion itself. Once I land on a final piece, I cut the shapes from clay and build them into the central form by hand.I want to make intangible things tangible. My work explores how emotion and character — things that don't naturally have a physical shape — can take on structure and form. I'm interested in the character I perceive in people, in living beings, and in the patterns I notice in nature — the way both carry a kind of essence that's hard to name but easy to feel. My work is my attempt to give that essence a body: geometry becomes the language, and clay becomes the material, for something that would otherwise stay invisible. It's rooted in the present — how I see and feel the world right now, translated into clay.
Biography
My ceramic sculptural work lives between two related questions: how repetitive patterns found in nature can be conjured into geometrical form, and how a person's character and essence can be expressed as physical form. Geometry becomes a language for something otherwise intangible — a way of translating what I feel and perceive into something you can hold.Born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1985, I came into ceramics after taking classes at a local studio in 2020 — a leap that, at the time, felt unnerving, but changed everything about how I related to creating. I moved back to my home country in 2022 and shortly after began working with Artesanías de Colombia, exhibiting mostly functional pieces to sell at local artisanal fairs. More recently, I've participated with ArtBo in the exhibition of my sculptures, and I currently run Mari & Clay, my studio in Bogotá, where I develop sculptural and functional ceramics alongside a line of proprietary glazes and in-studio workshops.Raised in Bakersfield, California, and formed by two cultures — Colombian and American — I was the daughter of two architects, and spent my afternoons sketching and drawing action figures, drawn to the pictures and images in magazines and books I got my hands on. I consider myself self-taught in art, having studied Industrial Design at Universidad de los Andes rather than fine art formally. After years working in tech as a graphic designer — work that felt like it was slowly draining the life out of me — I finally came into art fully, and discovered I was an artist. Today, my focus continues to shift toward sculptural work — translating the character I see in people and the patterns I notice in nature into form, with clay as my medium.
works
My sculptures turn the intangible — nature's patterns, an individuals essence — into geometric, expressive form.
Contact Me
Text
Text
Text