Catherine Velasquez works in 542 square feet, and the limitations of that space have become part of her process. “Working out of my 542-sq ft apartment has its challenges,” she says, “but it’s also pushed me toward more intentional time spent researching dynastic works and periods, reading up on artists, and testing new surface details.” The constraint has become a discipline—daily sketching, slower testing, more deliberation before anything gets built in three dimensions. “I’ve been allowing myself to enjoy all the steps in the process. I’m typically more impatient and rush through the testing process, but with a smaller working space the process naturally moves slower.”

Clay is the Salt Lake City artist’s primary material, worked through traditional coil and pinch handbuilding, but she’s been reaching toward wood lately, a gradual departure into new territory, mostly for display purposes. Her surface language stays consistent: a multi-layered treatment combining mishima and intaglio techniques, pastel grounds cut with bold linework, forms that stay soft and pillowy, even as the imagery resonates with deep ancestry.

Velasquez traces her visual vocabulary to her two grandparents’ houses. To her Ah-Ma’s origami menagerie—”hundreds of brightly colored pieces of paper folded together to create various textured birds, delicate and precise”—set against the Colombian art filling her Mona and Papi’s home: terracotta tile, stuccoed walls, bronze bullfighters caught mid-motion. She folds in Botero’s heavyset figures and the floral motifs of Ming and Qing dynasty vases, arriving at something that keeps Botero’s exaggerated mass but empties it out.

The work is personal as much as formal territory. Velasquez describes growing up with “conflicting feelings of pride and shame” about her Colombian-Chinese heritage—pride passed down alongside “religious humility and feminine shame,” a name and a skin color she learned to explain away, fluency she didn’t fully have in either parent’s language. “There is conqueror’s blood in my veins but we do not talk about that,” she writes. “My tias and abuelita gossip in the kitchen but we do not listen to that. I sat quietly and learned contradiction.”

The current body of work, she says, is a reclamation of that pride—a way of maturing her own history into a personal iconography rather than an inherited silence. “I use creatures and vessels as symbols of time. Caged creatures retrace the same steps thousands of times and vessels contain indefinitely until they overflow. I utilize these motifs to capture stages in my life and ironically reflect my hidden desires and feelings.”

You can view more of the artist’s work at www.catvelasquez.com (a work in progress) and on Instagram.

All images courtesy of the artist.

Work in Progress

This 15 Bytes feature talks with artists about what is on their “easel” right now.