After enduring a profoundly difficult experience, one in which my body felt expelled, displaced within a confined space, I emerged with a heightened awareness of my physicality. My body felt altered, as if something within me had shifted, or perhaps revealed itself as it had always been. In the aftermath, I was given the chance to create something with my hands. I chose to sculpt Coyolxauhqui, a violent image of what happened to a woman, an image I had long wished to recreate and confront with my own eyes.

The process itself became part of the transformation. Working with clay, I shaped, molded, bisqued, glazed, and applied oxides, each step demanding attention, care, and presence. The fragmented form of Coyolxauhqui, rendered in fragile, glass-like pieces, mirrors the vulnerability of human flesh and bone. In reconstructing her image, I came closer to understanding my own fragmentation.

As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, “The Coyolxauhqui imperative is an ongoing process of making and unmaking. There is never any resolution, just the process of healing.”