Karla Garcia, a Dallas-based multidisciplinary artist, creates clay landscapes that urge us to reflect on our connections to place and each other.
In 2021, Karla Garcia’s first sculptural installation spread across her living room. On her Instagram account, she shared shots of warped cacti shapes alongside dining chairs, of her black and white cat perched next to smaller forms on tabletops. Working at home was a necessity in the middle of COVID-19 quarantine, but the setting was fitting for the project.
“I was thinking a lot about what I teach my daughter, her roots,” Garcia explains. “Each cactus was different, forming a landscape of my upbringing.”
Born in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, Garcia moved to El Paso with her mother and brother when she was twelve. The distance between the two cities is minimal, but the differences between them are stark. “There was a different language, different culture. Later on, the wall was built, and there was a question about what home means,” Garcia says. “I felt safe in my house with my mom, but outside, there was racism.”
But the same desert surrounded both cities—and Garcia realized the land was a literal common ground, a nexus she could explore with her craft. Though she works across media, Garcia uses primarily terracotta clay to create sculptures that evoke desert flora, fusing personal histories with cultural and political commentaries in landscapes of her own design. The sculptures themselves, often cacti forms, disrupt spaces, forcing viewers to pause and consider how they move across the landscape—to contemplate the rules that govern the space.
Migration is a main subject in Garcia’s work. Her first home installation, which morphed into shows at the Nasher Sculpture Center and 12.26 in Dallas, eventually made its way to the border in La Línea Imaginaria, a dual show at the Archaeology and History Museum of El Chamizal in Juárez and the Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso. The land ownership there was disputed for a century; rain and flood waters made it difficult to delineate a reliable border. Garcia sees the barrel cactus, which grows in and around both cities, as a common symbol of resilience and continuity. There’s a subtle but stubborn defiance to it.
“I wanted to create a dialogue,” Garcia says of the show, “to see what these plants would look like when they’re next to a divisive symbol [the border wall] versus in the natural landscape. I wanted people from both countries to see these at the same time.” By placing sculptures along both sides of the wall, Garcia troubled the very idea of the border.
Garcia wants us to question these lines, to pay attention to interstitial space between two poles. As it happened, there was a cartel shooting in Juárez on the day the dual exhibition was set to open. “There’s a lot of stress that happens at the border that is not really discussed between people,” Garcia says. “I wanted it to be seen and talked about.”
Even as her work expands in scope and shifts locations, the potency of Garcia’s forms remains grounded in their individual, idiosyncratic qualities. There is an intimacy to each of her sculptures; each cactus carries the trace of her body. She works out of her home studio in Dallas, where she lives with her husband and daughter.
“When I was in grad school, I was working in the studio and breastfeeding,” Garcia says. “It was an explosion of everything: feelings, emotions, research. I asked myself, ‘How can I reflect my history with forms, materials, techniques, and textures that are mine?’”
The result was her signature approach to clay: shaping it with her hands, leaving it raw, unfired. “I leave my prints on them, I pinch the vessels, I create this imprint of my presence,” Garcia says. The effect brings to mind the intentionally irregular shapes of Eva Hesse’s Repetition Nineteen III (1968), and the impulse for connection that defines Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series (1978).
In Garcia’s latest exhibition Cell Series: When the Grass Stands Still at the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas, overgrowth forced viewers to stop and consider the history and function of the space. The centerpiece of the installation was a patch of terracotta grass sprouting from a bed of bricks, in the middle of the gallery floor.
“I made each individual grass, which was very meditative,” Garcia says. “I would grab the clay and lift it up, as though from the ground.” The gesture was meant to mimic the movement of growth, a blade sprouting up under the desert sun.
“I was thinking about the people who were [in the cell]. The function of a cell is isolation. I wanted solace, was seeking solace,” Garcia explains. There is a sense of communion in this work, and a promise of freedom—her grass broke through the sterility of the gallery, ruptured the containment of the cell. “The light in the Old Jail was beautiful,” she adds, a bit wistful.
“I’m making another landscape now, focused more on my childhood—my mother is originally from the mountains of Chihuahua,” Garcia continues. She visited the mountains every summer as a child, and she’s eager to return with an altered lens to see how her memories compare to the present.
“I want to experience the landscape bigger, to zoom out and see the trees, the rocks, and waterfalls. I want to feel the energy that comes with seeing what the light is like,” she explains. There is an Impressionist quality to this approach—it’s not about capturing a moment or recreating a shape, but evoking a feeling.
Bridging boundaries to generate a visceral experience is, perhaps, Garcia’s ultimate goal in art-making and teaching. As an instructor at Dallas College, Garcia proposes art as an encounter between self and other—something a bit messy, like life. “I like teaching art appreciation because I get to talk to students about how to connect themselves to art,” she says.
“It becomes a conversation between the art and the students. It’s like creating a mirror.”
