Soledad Christie

Born Viña del Mar, Chile, 1962

A Chilean artist, Christie creates one-of-a-kind, handmade, sculptural vessels deeply rooted in the ancestral Pre-Columbian pottery tradition, including its ancient shaping, burnishing, and firing techniques. Surrounded by the vast, extraordinary landscape of San Pedro de Atacama, where she lives, Christie draws upon the sublimity of nature and the legacy of indigenous artisans who, for centuries, lived in concert with the natural world. On ongoing conversation with clay, Christie’s work is a sensory expression and emotional experience, capturing something ineffable about the vastness, solitude, and silence of Atacama desert and Altiplano territory

Combining that premodern heritage with a contemporary vision, Christie conceives of her artistic process as a durational practice: it is in the slowness of building each piece — resisting our obsession with speed and efficiency in a post-industrial age — that she recovers something vital about our shared humanity. Through that creation process, she finds a sort of rhythm between volume and form, stillness and movement, balance and tension

Using the traditional techniques of pinching, coiling, and paddling, each work is burnished with a small river stone several times during the drying process in order to achieve a tactile surface. Each work then undergoes two firings: a low temperature gas kiln firing and a traditional open sky firing, using llama and goat dung as fuel

Despite training as a graphic designer, ceramics became Christie’s primary artistic language. She trained with master ceramicists Luis Aracena and Tatané Durán, and drew inspiration from Isidora Ayavire and her traditional desert firings. Soledad received the Craft Seal of Excellence from the chilean Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage in 2013, 2015, and 2020. Her work is in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum in Santiago, Chile

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