Israel Gómez Mares: Transformando Sedimentos

Ceramic artist Israel Gómez Mares transforms his Ciudad Juárez studio into a community hub while creating art that connects desert clay to regional identity.

Israel Gómez Mares in his Ciudad Juárez studio. Photo: Alonso Robles.

I’m beckoned into the estudio of “maestro Isra,”¹ as ceramicist Israel Gómez Mares is known among friends and community members who respect him. It’s a small adobe house in downtown Ciudad Juárez, passed down from his late grandmother, which he transformed by his own means into the locus of ceramics in the city’s art ecosystem. He welcomes me with epazote² tea. Bright yellow walls coat the interior of his three-room, one-bunker studio.

Gómez Mares has been shaping this space since 2011, two years before graduating from El Centro Municipal de las Artes, a technical art school in Juárez. Gómez Mares talks about his studio as a project, which couldn’t be more descriptive of his work and life philosophy: the constant transformation of materia³ is central to his practice. His studio has been like a masa of clay⁴ that he has molded and transformed over the last fourteen years—for himself, as well as the entire community he supports.

The studio space and the network of ceramicists that he has fostered through workshops and regular open studios is called Cerámica Corporaichon—Spanglish wordplay for “corporation.” He tells me that from the get-go the space was meant to be shared, almost as if there hadn’t been another option.

He thinks of the project’s history as composed of three parts: “the Classical Period, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.”

“In the first phase, la gente⁵ opened up quickly because it was free. I remember I made some flyersitos⁶ with pencil. I added the date and time, the address, the name and I went and did un chingo⁷ of copies and went out and handed out flyers,” he says. In 2012, the project kicked off with a full year of funding from El Programa de Estímulos a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico, a state-offered grant. At the beginning it was mainly neighbors that came by, with the occasional tecatillo,⁸ who he wishes would come in to do ceramics.

Israel Gómez Mares glazing ceramics in his Ciudad Juárez studio. Photo: Alonso Robles.

After the grant funding ended, he continued to open the studio on weekends, charging twenty Mexican pesos, equivalent to one U.S. dollar today. He calls this the middle period, or the Dark Ages, for while the cotorreo⁹ and its casual nature opened up to become a communal ritual, it also lent itself to desmadre.¹⁰ Tired of this irregular dynamic, next came the Renacimiento,¹¹ the third phase of the project, and a restructuring, starting in 2016.

“I started to realize that I could improve the quality,” he says. He began investing in the materials and upkeep of the space.

By 2024, with the system he had created as an artist and mentor firmly established, Gómez Mares had built a consistent community, so much so that it necessitated more space for storage of raw artistic materials. “I wasn’t going to get the permit to build up, so I built down,” he says, telling me about the process of digging out his “bunker,” a DIY cellar to store the literal tons of clay that the project requires.

Through anthropomorphic figures, he characterizes that familiar feeling of being an imperfect creature of this place, like a soul made of mud.

“I have the advantage of having this space, and that it’s mine. I have the freedom to do whatever I want with it,” he says.

He speaks of the bunker as a sculpture, a ritual-like project that allowed for the transformation of his space but also a metamorphosis of himself. With the help of two compas,¹² he dug twenty tons of sand out of the middle of the studio to create the storage structure. “To me, el bunker was an exercise in reminding myself who I am, but also a technical exercise—if this has to be done, we’re going to do it.” The bunker is just one of the many solutions he’s developed to address his needs; he has even made a kiln out of an old metal trash can.

Recent works by Israel Gómez Mares — Recent works from Israel Gómez Mares’s *Demonios Falsos* series.

At CMA, his professor taught him how to find and dig clay in the Chihuahuan Desert, given that commercial clay is not exactly an accessible material in Juárez. Gómez Mares’s process of learning how to manipulate the regional sediments has come from lots of exploration, trial, and error.

“Before, I used to be impatient,” he says about the process of learning ceramics. “Even if it is an inert object, it has its own personality and you have to respect it. It is like a trueque,¹³ because you can’t rush its process. […] Even if you do everything right technically, the material will still behave the way it will.”

Gómez Mares finds beauty in the process of the material’s evolution, learning to have faith in its unpredictability. His solo exhibition, Sedimento, variaciones de material y memoria,¹⁴ on view at Azul Arena in Juárez through March 2025, encapsulates this process.

With his work rooted in the organic nature of clay, it is intrinsic for Gómez Mares to capture the Chihuahuan Desert region as a means of exploring identity. Through anthropomorphic figures, he characterizes that familiar feeling of being an imperfect creature of this place, like a soul made of mud. He fuses the memory of this desert with the people who have lived and continue to live within it. In his study of ceramics throughout history and across cultures, he examines how aesthetics are shaped by regional materials and intentionally incorporates related processes into his work, creating not only representations of the desert but objects made of this place.

Gómez Mares notes that according to “occult sciences,” a person’s soul grows through labor and creation. “It’s innate in all of us to build, but it’s up to us to practice it,” he says. “I think it is really pleasurable and beautiful to keep working with my hands. In a way, I don’t want to let go of that primitive root because I’ve understood it does me good.”