Today we’d like to introduce you to Tatiana Cardona.
Hi Tatiana, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I like to think my art journey started when I was a little girl, my late father was an Artist. He worked with paper mache, wood and mostly made sculptural paintings. So it was very much a part of my life early on. He would set up a little workspace for me to work alongside him which rooted a deep love for expressing myself creatively. He passed when I was only nine years old and so did the art part of my life. I have always been creative and that didn’t change but I didn’t dedicate any time to creating projects of my own until my first year of college. I took a ceramics class in high school and I loved it but for me, it was just a class at that point. Once I was in college, the first few semesters I had no idea what I even wanted to do, no majors appealed to me. I remembered how much I loved my ceramics class in high school and something just told me to dive into that intuition, so I did. I went from undecided major to fine arts major and just took a risk because I knew no matter the outcome I would enjoy what I was learning.
Many, many, many people told me it was a horrible idea to waste my college experience on art and that I wouldn’t make any money but I literally did not care. I’m not sure what gave me so much courage to follow my gut so blindly but I like to think it was my dad guiding me. I tried every art medium you can think of, painting, sculpture, jewelry making, graphic design, drawing, but something about the physical nature of ceramics just spoke to me, it really felt like clay chose me. It was during my last year in college when I had to do my thesis show that I came up with my lip pots. I was learning about the feminist art movement at the time and I was simultaneously angry at the lack of female representation in art history classes/books. Which inspired my thesis project, which was a series of 15 vases with the lips of important female artists through history like Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, Faith Ringgold, Judy Chicago, etc. From this project, people asked for their own lip cups and that’s really how it began. When I graduated college, I worked full-time at Whole foods and worked on my art whenever I had the chance. One day I just couldn’t take it anymore and I took another blind risk, I quit my job and decided to work on my art full time. I was terrified and had no idea what I was going to do but I knew if I didn’t give it my all it would never succeed.
Sure enough, the risk paid off, it wasn’t immediate, there were a lot of difficult times where I just wanted to give up but I loved it so much and believed in it so much I kept trying. Then TikTok came along, it was the beginning of the popularization of TikTok and I started posting little clips of my art process. Suddenly one of those videos went viral and with that came followers that turned into customers and finally a breath of fresh air because I could finally sustain myself with my work. It was really good timing, a lot of hard work and believing in myself that put me in the position I’m at today. I also have a very strong support system, my friends, family and most importantly my partner have been by my side, helping me in every way, without them I would not be here. Since then, my work has evolved and keeps evolving, my goal is to just make things that make people smile. My work is very rooted in healing my inner child which is why it’s so colorful and playful. I think I will always make work that is meant to speak to the inner child in all of us because I think we’re all searching for that innate magic and joy we could find so easily as children that gets harder to find as we grow older.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Is any road smooth? I don’t think anyone makes anything worth having without some bumps along the way. Like every artist, I struggled to pay my bills for years, I was working all day and night making way less than I would at any job simply because I loved it and that was more important to me. I knew I was building something and that would take time. Ceramics is also a very difficult medium to work with, it requires expensive equipment and many times things do not come out how you envision them. There were multiple occasions that months worth of work would come out of the kiln (big oven) warped, broken, cracked, completely unusable. It was very disheartening, spending months working on a collection of work and then it coming out destroyed. But those were all lessons I had to learn to grow and get better.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m an artist. I work mostly with ceramics and I’m known for my lip pots. I am most proud of living out my dad’s dream of becoming a full-time artist. I get to do what I love on a daily basis. I am living proof that it is possible! I am so proud of the fact that I can inspire other women out there to follow their dreams.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
My industry is already changing, because of social media people have so much more opportunities to create and sell their work online. No longer are we subjected to putting our work in galleries and hoping for someone to purchase something over the course of days, weeks or even months. We can show our work online and sell it online, we can market ourselves in ways that were never available before. People are already taking more chances on creating their own businesses instead of working miserable jobs for corporations. The ceramics community specifically is changing and will continue to change to be a more inclusive medium, where before it was exclusive to white men. This is important because with more inclusivity brings new ideas and more people pushing the boundaries of ceramics. I think ceramics will be seen less as a craft/ hobby and more of a serious art medium. Ceramics will continue to grow in popularity as is has in the past few years bringing in a shift from production mug-making material to a limitless art medium.
Pricing:
- Mugs $300-450
- Vases $1500-$2000
- Planters $400-$1000
Contact Info:
- Website: femalealchemy.com
- Instagram: @female.alchemy
- Other: tiktok @female.alchemy
