Juan Granados constructs a potent dialogue between memory, history, and cultural identity through his ceramic-based mixed media works.
Juan Granados creates ceramic-based works that combine sculpture and photo transfer to explore memory, migration, and cultural identity through material storytelling.
In this selection of pieces, Resting (Descansando), Bridge (Puente), and One Day (Un dÃa), Granados fuses traditional stoneware techniques with digital photo transfer, creating evocative meditations on place, family, and the persistence of personal and collective memory. Each work acts as a vessel, literal and symbolic, containing images, emotions, and echoes of diasporic experience.
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Resting (Descansando), Juan Granados, 2023, mixed media, 12 x 14 in. / 30.48 x 35.56 cm.
In Resting (Descansando), a vivid blue image of a mother and child sits like a relic embedded within a rugged, textured ceramic form. The cracked glaze surface over the photo transfer suggests aging and fragility, while the surrounding earthy sculpture evokes organic growth, roots, tendrils, even flame. This piece becomes both a sanctuary and a reliquary, honoring the quiet endurance of motherhood and generational bonds.
Bridge (Puente), Juan Granados, 2024, mixed media, 13 x 13 in. / 33.02 x 33.02 cm.
Bridge (Puente) positions its imagery within a silvery, almost alien terrain. The surrounding ceramic mass appears molten, metallic, and in motion, enveloping a photographic window into a wooded bridge scene. The lone figure at the threshold implies transition, migration, memory, or perhaps the bridging of ancestral and modern worlds. It’s a liminal work that captures the tension between displacement and connection.
One Day (Un dÃa), Juan Granados, 2024, mixed media, 10.5 x 10.5 in. / 26.67 x 26.67 cm.
In One Day (Un dÃa), Granados centers two children within a field of soft, ghostlike imagery. The photo sits in the heart of a round, dish-like form, drawing attention to its symbolic centrality. Black-and-white tones surround a patch of colored sky, hinting at selective recollection or the way time alters our perception. Here, innocence coexists with erasure, what is remembered and what is lost, highlighting how personal histories are shaped by both clarity and distortion.
Granados’s work is a meditation on cultural continuity through material form. Each piece marries tactile, earthy ceramic processes with ephemeral, digitized memory fragments. This synthesis transforms ordinary moments into sacred records, making visible the tension between the physical and the intangible, the inherited and the personal. Through these layered vessels, Granados invites us to consider how identity is preserved, constructed, and passed on.
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