Soledad Christie

Soledad Christie was born in 1962 in Viña del Mar, Chile. She has lived in San Pedro de Atacama for almost 30 years. Surrounded by a vast and amazing landscape, she connects with the strength of an ancient local language: pre-Columbian pottery. Her work is deeply rooted in the ancestral pre-Columbian pottery tradition and its ancient shaping, burnishing and firing processes. It is in the slowness of the process of building each piece where she finds a sort of rhythm between volume and form, stillness and movement, balance and tension.

Soledad makes one-of-a-kind handbuilt, sculptural vessels using the traditional techniques of pinching, coiling and paddling. Each piece is burnished with a small river stone several times during the drying process, in order to achieve a tactile surface. Each piece undergoes two firings, a low temperature gas kiln firing and then a traditional open sky firing, using llama and goat dung as fuel.

Through an ongoing relation with clay, her work is meant to express intuitions and sensations that are constantly present when inhabiting the vast Atacama Desert and Altiplano territory and its outstanding atmosphere. The territory has become a part of her identity; silence, solitude and vastness have shaped her and her work immensely.