Stefanie Guerrero at Martha’s
Stefanie Guerrero and Ana Villagomez, “Entrelazados,” at Martha’s Contemporary in Austin, Texas
Stefanie Guerrero is tending to a nuclear garden: organic shapes, textures, and colors build up like molten lava, cactus flowers casting shadows against Mexico’s desert sands, or radioactive sludge seeping out of concrete ruins. Fragility begets fierceness. Regeneration is echoed in the mutant metallic spikes and fluid earthy forms. Her ceramic sculptures reckon with mankind’s relationship to the natural world. They are tender and foreboding, inviting you to examine their fluid contours up close while minding their sharp edges.
In Entrelazadas (Intertwined in Spanish), Guerrero’s new ceramic sculptures offer a meditation on the duality of nature — death and rebirth, strength and vulnerability, beauty and brutality. Earth is in an endless cycle of transmutation: seeds germinate, fragile green stems shoot through dirt, and leaves stretch out to the sun before shriveling and dropping to fertilize the ground. Chemicals spill, landfills overflow, concrete expands, climates shift due to global warming, and yet nature adapts. Guerrero’s sculptures capture this resilience, this constant state of motion, these natural and unnatural alchemies.
In Serpents Bloom, 2023, murky charcoal-hued petals wrap around and emerge from a curved spine of spiked, metallic armor, as creamy pink salvia-like glaze oozes from the openings. In Basic Instinct, 2023, a flower pod rises above an enclave of fronds that wrap around its roots like a nest; red spots rest on the tips, either a parasitic infestation, or a warning sign to predators signifying poison, or even a crimson camouflage from a faraway landscape. Other works like Infestation, 2023, and Nuclear Garden, 2023 (the latter is shaped like a prickly bomb) appear more invasive and ominous.
Guerrero is part of a new generation of artists who are pushing the boundaries of ceramic sculpture and breathing new life into the medium. Straddling the line between art and craft, functional and decorative, clay lends itself to present-day conversations about identity: it takes up space, it is tactile, and it can mimic a body, an object, or an idea. She traces her practice back to Mexican craftsmanship, indigenous mythology, and ancient spirituality that teaches a holistic connection between humans and nature. She was born in Austin, Texas, soon after her parents immigrated from Refugio, a small town in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Growing up, Guerrero came to know San Luis Potosí’s verdant mountains, the waterfalls of La Huasteca Potosina, and the Wirikuta Desert as her second home. Indigenous legend has it that the world originated high in that San Luis Potosi desert: it was there that the sun appeared on Earth for the first time and warmed the soil.
As a first-generation Mexican-American artist, Guerrero’s works explore how the displacement and resilience found in the natural world is echoed in humanity. Her sculptures provide a powerful commentary on the essential role of adaptation and transformation as survival tools, especially within immigrant communities. She tends to her terrain with assured strength, pushing the clay into dynamic shapes. A self-taught artist, she works from her home studio in Ridgewood, Queens, where she also teaches ceramics workshops. As Guerrero delves further into her practice, her sculptures get bigger; her materials expand, but her vision stays the same. She works with clay, metal, and resin to mimic organic forms. Guerrero gravitates towards the adaptability of clay. “Clay also has to survive through the elements of the hands and being fired; it goes through a traumatic experience before emerging from the chrysalis of the kiln fully formed,” she says, noting that she finds beauty in the process’s imperfections.
