Laura Villegas Sernaitis

I was born in Pereira, Colombia, and grew up in Medellín. Restless from a young age, drawn to the invisible world —both etheric and artistic— I found in my hands a way to reach it. My curiosity about reality, about seeing people as stories, led me to train as a makeup artist for film and television in Vancouver, Canada.

After ten years working in that world, a search for coherence made me reconsider my course. After the shake-up of the pandemic, in complete innocence, I took ceramics classes in Mexico City —the country makeup had brought me to— and, unexpectedly, I found a certainty.

I discovered that what drew me to makeup and to ceramics was the same thing: life, time, and the relationship between who we are, how we live and where we are. Today I live in Coatepec, Veracruz, a place the earth brought me to, where I keep learning this craft, working with clays I gather and firing in a wood kiln, in direct dialogue with fire.

My practice has taken me to different territories where, learning from the people who work clay, I discover other ways of relating to the earth. Their techniques, their hands and the forms they make show me how each place expresses itself in its clay, and how those differences, in the end, are part of the same thing. Each territory transforms the way I work and also the way I live, leading me to ask about my own earth —my body— and my relationship with it.

I see ceramics as a precise metaphor for life; that is why writing accompanies my practice, as another way of kneading and holding memory.