There is no wrong way to engage with this book, but if you would like to follow the step-by-step instructions to build a full, 25 inch (64 cm) figure, first start by printing out the photographic references found in Appendix A. These are pictures of our model from the four cardinal views: front, back, left, and right. Follow the enlargement instructions on the photos to print them to the right size, then pin them up on your studio wall at approximately the same height as your work surface.

It is important to understand that these pictures are an exact, one-to-one representation of the figure you will be sculpting in clay. You will take direct measurements with calipers from the photographs and transfer them to your sculpture, and you will be looking back and forth from sculpture to photographs at every stage of the process. The cardinal views are your anchors, while the intermediate views, found in Appendix B, simply give you more information as you begin refining your emerging figure from all angles.

Next, print the templates found in Appendix C, also following the enlargement instructions to make them the proper size. You will use these templates by laying the paper onto your clay slabs, cutting around the perimeter, and transferring any reference marks from the template to the clay. Following the instructions, you will turn these slabs into hollow forms, the starting points for the major volumes of the body, then assemble them and refine them through successive rounds of sculpting.

The rest of the book, the historical and personal perspectives on figurative sculpture, as well as the artist galleries and interviews, offer new vistas to expand your sense of creative possibilities within this practice and to deepen your understanding of the boundless technical and conceptual possibilities in this field. I hope you find it as rich, challenging, and satisfying as I have!

I have memories of my childhood in Puerto Rico, attending church and looking up at the sculptures of angels and saints surrounding the congregation. They looked down with faces full of ecstasy, torment, and serenity—a biblical range of emotion that simmered below the surface of life. In those sacred spaces, I began to understand how every gesture and every set of upward-cast eyes could tell a story.

In the context of Catholicism, introduced to Puerto Rico while under Spanish rule, figures play a key role in the act of worship. They offer cues to elicit heightened emotional states, orienting our attention to the transcendence and pathos at the core of the Catholic doctrine. For me, they were magnificent and otherworldly, and it would have never occurred to my younger self that they were not divinely created. Building layers of detail into my own pieces, I am often amazed at the sentient qualities that begin to ensue from the gradual reorganization of this telluric material. This feeling echoes my childhood sense of disbelief around the possibility of inciting the illusion of life through a creative practice.

I also practiced dance and movement from an early age, which is another big childhood connection to figurative language. The insight into the mechanics of movement and the expressive potential of choreographed bodies grounds me to this day in the figurative vernacular. This language works through the sociocultural coding we recognize, as well as through the endless somatic expressions that fall just outside what is readily acknowledged, opening a vast field of possibilities that appeal to our different mechanisms of understanding the corporeal, from the conventional and conscious, to the latent and subliminal. All our stories are encoded there, in the language of the body.

My devotion to the figure found a powerful mechanism for expression when I was formally introduced to clay by the Puerto Rican ceramic artist and architect, Jaime Suárez, during my third year of studies at the University of Puerto Rico. Suárez’s influence on the contemporary ceramics’ movement cannot be overstated. As an architect, his groundbreaking vision and implementation of clay to express ideas of time and space at impressive scales proved profoundly inspiring. Through the work executed during that semester, I began to understand clay as a material that could capture my vital energy through touch.

Through my trajectory down the path of figurative ceramics, I began to make connections between the figurative sculpture I had experienced in the context of spirituality and my own sculpture oriented towards a secular viewer. I gradually understood how the deep conceptual ties I had cultivated with devotional figures, both in church and in my childhood home brimming with my mother’s collection of saints and virgins, were present in my artistic practice. My connection with devotional objects allowed me to recognize that my sculptural work plays on a similar process by seeking to orchestrate an emotional experience through the careful selection of the gesture, scale, and surface comprising a figure, appealing to our innate human disposition to connect with the self-referential.

I believe clay has a voice and a disposition. In my practice, the greatest synergy between material and concept is the result of a careful negotiation between traditional hand building approaches, guided by observational systems drawn from the world of naturalistic rendering.

As human beings, we are primed to react to our reflection. You connect with a figure, identify with it, and through that phenomenon tap into a sense of a shared story.

Within the vast world of artistic figuration, clay has been used to form representational sculptures throughout history. From the Neolithic periods in Eurasia and Africa to Pre-Columbian indigenous communities in the Caribbean and the Americas, clay has served as a means to create anthropomorphic objects that speak to the longings, fears, and beliefs of a community. Examples such as the Nok terra-cotta figures from Nigeria (1500 BCE–500 CE) or the elaborate Jaina terra-cotta sculpture (300–1200 CE) from present-day Mexico exquisitely embody a full range of impressions from daily life. In the case of the Jaina sculpture, used primarily as funerary accompaniments and created in a naturalistic style, the figures are an anthropological treasure, offering a view into the physicality, dress, and customs of the late Classic Maya civilization.

Amidst the myriad of extraordinary representational clay objects held within the annals of history across different cultures, let’s take a brief stop along the way at a few objects and periods that have deeply captivated me. First, there’s the terra-cotta army of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, created to accompany him in the afterlife (210–209 BCE). Comprising more than 6,000 life-sized warriors, the scope of this effort, driven by the unique beliefs of the period, still amazes me.

Across the world, the magnificent Ife terracotta busts from Nigeria (1000–1400 CE) offer a highly evolved and realistic record of the time, complete with detailed body ornamentation that transports us into this remote African kingdom. They add so much to our knowledge of the rich landscape of tribal renderings throughout the continent.

Shifting our focus to Europe, let’s take a look at the use of clay throughout the Italian Renaissance. During this time, the use of terra-cotta by artists gained increasingly more importance, which lead to its full revival during the 15th century. In one form or another, clay played a role in the studio practice of most sculptors. One of its key roles was to help articulate ideas and create models or prototypes that would inform works in bronze, marble, or stone. Amidst all the highly evolved art of the period, it is these rough, ephemeral objects that ignite my imagination. Though fragile and modest in size, many of these artifacts summon the urgent energy underlying the invocation of ideas. They offer dynamic versions of monumental compositions that were ultimately rendered in much more controlled and conventional manners with sterner materials. Michelangelo’s contorting terra-cotta models of Hercules and a slave, and Giambologna’s sketch of a river god, offer examples of this practice of creating bozzetti to explore possibilities and inform their creative practice. Later, during the neoclassical period, Antonio Canova would continue the wide use of gestural and lively clay sketches to speak to the ideas of the sublime and heroic.

In addition to these maquettes and standing apart from the bevy of sculptural artists of the Italian Renaissance, Luca della Robbia’s figurative terra-cotta sculpture broke new ground in the implementation of ceramics. Through technological discoveries involving the firing of tin- and lead-glazed terra-cotta to higher temperatures, the objects became stable and long-lasting. They were also covered with glossy, vivid surfaces. At times emulating marble, his pieces, and later those of other family members, revolutionized the potential of this medium to convey the sculptural ideals of the time, specifically in the context of religious iconography.

The last twenty years have seen great advances in the field of contemporary figurative ceramics as methods and techniques have continued to evolve. There are now both a myriad of entry points into the practice and a dizzying number of sculptors worth investigating. Nonetheless, I would like to point out a few giants who broke ground both technically and conceptually, adding diversity and dynamism to our field.

Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, artists like Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, Stephen de Staebler, AkioTakamori, Jean Pierre Laroque, George Jeanclos, and Patti Warashina began utilizing the language of the body as a way to articulate powerful commentaries through satire and pathos. In the realm of naturalism, Judy Fox, Doug Jeck, Dirk Staschke, and Tip Toland pioneered the creation of compelling, hyper-detailed, and emotionally charged compositions. These days there are too many extraordinary artists to point to, but Beth Cavener, Simone Leigh, Matt Wedel, En Iwamura, and Vanessa Beecroft are creating seminal, extraordinary work that uses the language of representation in clay to attest to their unique places within our shared human experience. I encourage you to research all the above and more whenever you are in need of inspiration.

In this book, I hope that by guiding you through my process you will discover for yourself how rich and dynamic working with the human figure can be.