ANNA CÁRDENAS

Anna Cárdenas has been a participant in Santa Fe’s Spanish Market since 2018, receiving the Honorary Mention Award in 2018 for her work in micaceous clay. Anna has exhibited work at Placitas Gallery, La Sala Gallery, the Santa Fe Public Library and her pots cook in private homes across the United States.

She studied ceramics at Luna Vocational School with Don White in Springer, New Mexico and with renowned artist and potter, Felipe Ortega. From Ortega’s work, as well with Aurora Sanchez, Anna draws her inspiration. At a Spanish Market many years ago, she was so drawn to the sparkling surfaces on their pottery that she introduced herself to Aurora and was initiated into micaceous clay.

Foods cooked in micaceous clay pots take on smoky flavour, making slow cooked meats particularly mouthwatering. Preparing micaceous clay for cooking vessel is careful and laborious process, but well worth it, especially after tasting the food cooked inside a micaceous pot. Anna digs the clay in the mountains, clears out any stones and twigs, soaks the clay in a vat of water, digs out any remaining twigs, and when the clay starts drying, rolls it into a ball and bags it. 

In her Galisteo studio, Anna begins her pots as a tortilla shaped circle, which she places in a puki, a round plate, set on a turntable. Adding coils of micaceous clay, she builds her pots, until they are ready to be scored and smoothed with wet calf skin or leather and let dry for a week. She sands her pots first with a pumice rock she found in the mountains, and burnishes them with a river rock. Removing air bubbles is essential to preventing the pot from blowing up when firing in her Kiva fireplace. 

She occasionally works in other types of clay and loves creating creatures, vases, platters and freeform vessels.