Left:
Despojos, 2010
ceramic, metal
13 x 14 x б in.
Right:
Dulce, 2011
ceramic, metal,
resin, paper
1.3 x3.2 x1ft.
Below:
Paseante, 2009
glass, ceramic, resin
22 x 8 x 8 in.
For most of the past decade,
Cordova has made her home in
the Blue Ridge Mountains of
North Carolina, close to Pen-
land School of Crafts, a place
near and dear to her heart. But
her soul resides a world away.
She was born in Boston, where
her parents were medical stu-
dents; they returned to their
native Puerto Rico for good
when she was 6 months old.
The island’s omnipresent
Catholicism gave Cordova her
earliest sense of the power of the
figure, and fostered her interest
in magical realism. “My parents
were very consistent in taking
us to church. On Holy Friday,
we would visit 10 churches, and
my mom would light a candle in
each one,” she recalls. During
Mass, she would stare up at the
statues of saints, profoundly
moved by the sorrow, passion,
and benevolence expressed
in their faces and stances, the
position of their hands, the
folds of their robes.
“They drew so much out of
me, so much empathy. But also
they were intimidating, and
they were sad, and they were
grotesque, some of them, like
the bleeding Christ,” she says.
Later, as an art student
at the University of Puerto
Rico at Mayagiiez, Cordova
became fascinated by how
certain visual effects in reli-
gious iconography - the over-
large, glistening eyes of the
statues, their smooth skin -
were by design, if not really
divine, meant to elicit a vis-
ceral response in the faithful.
What would happen, she
wondered, if such devices
were transposed to a contem-
porary art context?
At university, she dabbled
in painting, drawing, and print-
making before taking a course
with Jaime Suarez, a leader in
Puerto Rico’s contemporary
ceramics movement. “He had a
very free and fluid approach to
the material.” Soon Cordova
was “obsessed” with clay. “That
it somehow captured so much of
an imprint - not only physically
but also the imprint of myself,
the frequency of what I had
inside - was really captivating.”
To develop her technical
skills, Cordova went on to
study ceramics at Alfred Uni-
versity in New York, and was
committed to the figure by the
time she earned her M FA in
2002. She also met and married
fellow student Pablo Soto, a
glass artist from Texas, whose
parents, Ishmael Soto and Finn
Alban, are both ceramists.
Their friend Cynthia Bringle,
the celebrated potter long asso-
ciated with Penland, told the
young newlyweds about the
school’s three-year residency
program for emerging artists.
They arrived at Penland in 2003
and never left.
feb/mari2 american craft 057
