The Bogota-based artist explains how a collection of hand-pinched ceramics, made in the days after an earthquake hit her home country, became a meditation on what keeps the world habitable.
Danna Gutiérrez is a visual artist from Cali, Colombia, now based in Bogota, working under the name Gallina Clueka – an experimental multidisciplinary project that treats drawing as a starting point rather than a destination with an end point. What begins as an image on paper regularly ends up in a different form as a ceramic vessel, a piece of jewellery, a print or a textile. “I like thinking of my drawings as something that can leave the paper, become something that can be touched and used, and eventually inhabit other people’s spaces,” she says.
Gaillina Clueka started small, as a way to share more of what Danna was making on social media. Over time it’s become the space where all her different interests come together, without her having to choose just one discipline over another. Ceramics has been part of that practice for around five years, learned mostly by teaching herself and picking up knowledge from friends along the way. She works almost entirely with the pinch technique, shaping clay by hand rather than on a wheel. “The marks from my fingers remain in the clay, and I feel that this creates a connection with my drawings.”
A large part of how Danna releases her work is through what she calls a “drop” – a themed collection of pieces, usually ceramics, made and put out together around a single idea, in the way a small independent brand might release a seasonal collection. Her process behind a drop varies. Sometimes she gathers reference images and draws her way towards a concept before touching any clay; other times she skips drawing altogether and lets the shape of the piece emerge from the act of pinching itself.
“I like having that space for intuition, where I don’t know exactly where the piece is going until it starts to emerge,” she explains. She knows a piece is finished by feel, when she’s “played enough with the space” – and if something still feels incomplete, she sets it aside rather than force it, often only realising what’s missing once she’s stepped away.
Her most recent drop, El mundo (“The World”), is a run of white ceramic jars, each painted with a small red circle, running black dogs and phrases like ‘The Light of the World’ and ‘The Sound of the World’ scratched into the surface. “The drop wasn’t very premeditated,” she says. “All of this also emerged as I was making and composing each piece.” Its meaning arrived partway through. A week before she finished the collection, an earthquake hit her city and others across Colombia. In the days that followed, she watched rescue workers and search dogs pull people from rubble, entire communities showing up for one another in the middle of disaster.
Looking back at the jars she’d already been making – the red circle standing in for a world she describes as being “in everything and in every tiny thing,” the dogs she’d drawn without quite knowing why – she realised the work had already been speaking to what was unfolding around her. “It makes me think that the dogs searching for people and other animals are these dogs,” she says, “that the sound of the world is also silence, but also that humanity; and that somehow, light emerges from somewhere.”
Alongside more drawings, Danna will start a printmaking residency later this year. And she’s hoping to push her practice further outward towards collaboration and exchange with other artists. “I’d also like to return to certain ways of creating that allow me to awaken my creativity and continue exploring other ways of making,” she says. “I’m very interested in that exchange and in everything that can emerge when making is no longer something individual.”
