Andrea Cárdenas

Artist Statement

I work with ceramics because I survived.
Because clay allowed me to stay when everything pushed me toward disappearance.
I was born in Yucatán, a land where the sacred and the dark coexist without asking permission. My creatures emerge from this lineage: bodies that cannot be understood with a single glance, faces that are not masks but portals. Each piece is a complete being, with its own character, memory, and contradictions. Nothing is only a face.
My work explores the duality that lives within every person: light and shadow, faith and doubt, beauty and fear. My relationship with God is neither simple nor comforting; it is deep, sometimes uncomfortable, and always present. Through clay, I confront what cannot be spoken aloud.
Before becoming an artist, I was an interior designer. I learned how to construct spaces. Now I construct presences. The transition from design to art was not an escape, but a reclamation—I always knew I belonged here.
I am a Mexican woman working in the United States, shaped by displacement and reinvention. I am an autistic woman, diagnosed in adulthood, who learned the name of her difference late, but never the depth of her strength. Reaching art was not a clean or easy path; it was an act of resistance.
My childhood was marked by abuse and violence. I do not work from victimhood, but from survival. Art is not decorative catharsis; it is a way of remaining, of transforming wounds into matter, weight, and presence.
I work with darkness not to glorify it, but to face it directly. I believe in a deeper vision: characters that hold history, spirit, and contradiction. Creatures that return to us the question of who we are when we stop pretending to be whole.
Working with ceramics is a slow act in a world that demands speed. It is touching the earth, accepting failure, allowing fire to decide. In that process, I find truth.
For me, art is not a choice. It is survival.
It is root.
It is imperfect faith.
It is a body that remains.