“ T h e s e p i e c e s a r e i n n e r. l a n d s c a p e s, t a c t i l e p o e m s .”
Claudia Fuentealba is a multidisciplinary artist working in fiber, sculpture, and abstract painting, creating tactile works that live between architecture and emotion. Born in Puerto Rico to Chilean immigrants, her practice is shaped by themes of displacement, reinvention, and the quiet tension between structure and vulnerability.
Her sculptural weavings explore contrast as language—soft wool against rigid copper, leather beside rope, gesture held within tension. These works function as architectural metaphors: grounded in tradition yet searching toward something unresolved. Through knotting, layering, and material resistance, Fuentealba investigates balance, containment, and the physical weight of memory.
In parallel, her paintings emerge as counterpoints—intuitive, gestural, and layered with gesso, pastel, and raw mark-making. Where the weavings pull inward with gravity and control, the paintings release energy outward, revealing moments of fracture, silence, and emotional residue. Texture becomes evidence rather than decoration; surface becomes narrative.
Working in evolving series from her Phoenix studio, Fuentealba approaches making as a dialogue between construction and erosion. Materials guide the process—pigment seeps, fibers resist, metal bends only when it chooses. Each piece unfolds slowly, revealing the labor and transformation embedded within it.
Her work does not seek to decorate, but to evoke. Drawing from personal and collective histories, she creates inner landscapes—tactile poems that invite stillness, complexity, and reflection. Through contrast and material presence, Fuentealba offers spaces where structure softens, silence speaks, and emotion takes form.