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Keka Ruiz-Tagle speaks to the ancestors—not through language, but through fire, pigment, and clay. Her ceramic figures, squat and monumental, solemn and watchful, seem to emerge from some intermediary plane of existence. They are not of this world exactly, but neither are they relics. They stand, instead, as carriers of something older, more intuitive—a memory held in the body of the earth.
Ruiz-Tagle began her artistic life as a painter, but it was through ceramics that her cosmological inquiries took root. Her practice is less about form than about transformation: of raw material, spirit, and time. She works clay the way a shaman channels energy—patiently, deliberately, and in communion with invisible forces. What results are works not imitative of pre-Columbian traditions, but steeped in the same impulse: to render the sacred visible.
Her art draws on the Andean world’s cosmogony, a belief system in which all matter is animated and sacred, where mountains are gods, and the solstice—sun and moon in dialogue—is not merely a celestial event but a spiritual reckoning. Ruiz-Tagle returns to this knowledge, not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity. In a time when the human relationship to the earth is increasingly severed, her sculptures offer a model of reconnection.
The Chilean artist has turned her works into a portal—part sculpture, part séance. Her work doesn’t just sit there looking mystical. It hums. Natural pigments seep into the porous clay and are pulled forth again by heat and smoke. Each piece is marked by this alchemical history—washed, darkened, and cracked by its applications, manipulations, and passage through flame.
Ruiz-Tagle speaks of Kamaquen, an Andean concept describing the vital energy that moves through all living things—animate and inanimate alike. “Kamaquen is the name given by the inhabitants of the Andes to the transforming energy that gives life and makes possible the procreation of the species. This élan vital animates all living beings, even those that the Western man calls inert.” Her figures are charged with this energy. They are not statues but thresholds, linking the terrestrial and the cosmic. There is, in her sculptures, the same silence one might encounter in a sacred space: not empty, but vibrating with memory, and with life.
IN THE STUDIO WITH KEKA RUIZ-TAGLE
In this brief but intimate video, the Chilean artist Keka Ruiz-Tagle opens the door to her studio and to the quiet rituals of her practice. Working with clay and glass, she reflects on the symbolic weight of her materials, the spiritual undercurrents that guide her hand, and the dualities that shape her visual language.
Visit Keka Ruiz-Tagle's website to learn more: CLICK HERE
