“What am I going to leave behind as an artist?” is something Katherine S. de Barrueta asks herself regularly. She thinks about this not only when choosing subject matter but also when considering what materials she is going to use in her artwork.
Katherine is worried about the environment for many reasons. One of her major reasons is that she wants a healthy environment and earth for her four children. What world are they going to have? How can she be a part of the past and the future? In thinking about the past, Katherine became fascinated with fossils and started working on a series that can now be found buried in the children’s park in Club de Golf La Ceiba, a park she was the founder of.
The resins that are so nice and easy to work with, that many sculptors use, are toxic, so for Katherine, that is a problem. She says that experimenting with the different materials is like cooking – it’s all about recipes, mixing ingredients. The ingredients she uses include cement, newspaper, marble powder, plaster of paris, steel, and cement. For color she adds mineral powders.
Since high school days, Katherine has dabbled in many art forms – from simple sketching to illustrating children’s books to sculpture. After attending and graduating from the Gerda Gruber Foundation Art School in Cholul, Yucatán, Katherine found her place in the art world with sculpture. She is particularly interested in fossils, remains of things, and nature. Looking at butterflies under a microscope where you actually see the cells and layers in the structure of butterfly wings helps her focus on how she is going to execute each piece that she designs and creates. She likes her pieces to look “organic” and after seeing her collection, it is easy to see that she has achieved her goal.
Katherine works in her backyard studio from 9 am – 2 pm Monday thru Friday and loves to have visitors. She is also very open to the idea of students and school groups visiting her gallery as a means to open their sensibility to art.
Prices on her pieces, that include fish, butterfly wings, seashells, fish skeletons, Maya snakes, and her famous fossils, range in price from $3,000 to $20,000 pesos. Check out her Huellas Design website at www.huellasdesign.com “Huellas” mean “prints”….the prints she wants to leave as her legacy here on the earth.
Born in Ohio, USA, Katherine has been living in Mérida, Yucatán for the past 25 years. Married to a Yucatecan, they live here with their four children and various dogs and cats.
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