The Personal Story
Me grew up in Sweden with Chilean parents, in Stockholm suburbs between
Mixed multicultural environment to very Swedish settings! In younger years I was privileged to travel in Europe and visits in Chile however was not till After high school that I started to traveled South America!
That's where the school of the craft really started! From the roads of Argentina, learning to make macrame and simple wire work from other travelling street artisans to old goldsmith maestros in La Paz Bolivia and Cusco, Peru! Both with a millennial of cultural legacy of the craft. To the lower amazon basins of Brazil where the women taught me how to do basket weaving from palm leafs and beautiful feather art.
To then later entering the School of Applied art and Fire crafts in Santiago, Chile! There I met with the teachers who have been my mentors long after I graduated!
From there I traveled to sit with maestro's in the bustling city of Mexico City, also a place with a millennial culture in the craft of metal and jewelry!
The journey though did not stop there, but took me further north, to the Curious Forge, a makerspace in the heart of gold county California that saw the birth of the gold rush, and back to studio spaces in the bohemian art district of Stockholm, Sweden! These are the places where I have learn the craft! However as a traveling artisan, the road is the school! The people and places that I have seen and traveled to beyond the ones mentioned above, are the teachers that I have learnt the most of! More than anything I am grateful to have connected back to my own ancestral roots of indigenous culture!
So more than putting names on prestigious workshops, schools and studios the experience of the relationship is what has brought the most wisdom to my life, of life itself and the craft!
Side note! Even though I have found a craft and materials that carry genocide and a lot of theft from first nation people in all of America ( and the world), what inspires me the most is the wisdom, meaning, symbolism and reverence the Pre-columbian cultures had of the elements, materials and the relationship to it! What sparks my imagination is how they used it as a vehicle for communication of their cosmo-vision and relations in it and to it!