Featured Artist: Mariana Bolaños Inclán

Visit the Craft Ontario Shop for Mariana Bolaños Inclán's featured collection, on display in the Feature Window from July 26 - August 25, 2024.

Mariana Bolaños is a Mexican ceramic sculptor based in Toronto. She has exhibited her work in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Focusing on art with a social purpose, she works as a facilitator in community programs around Toronto and the GTA. Mariana studied visual arts in Mexico and obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts from Centennial College when she moved to Canada. She graduated from the Ceramics program at Sheridan College in 2023 and is currently an artist-in-residence at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto.

A magnificent nopal grows in my mother’s garden. Its flowers invite hummingbirds to eat and find refuge from the heat of the Mayan land. When I visit my mother and witness the birds feed, I think about their symbolic role as messengers bringing us tales from beyond this world. I reflect on the way our stories and beliefs have been passed down generations, what parts have changed, and what still imbues our everyday interactions.

Following Spanish colonization, Indigenous communities in Mexico created intricate trees of life heavily decorated with flowers and animals. Used to teach, they narrate ideas about life and death that combine Indigenous and European beliefs. Now, their designs fuse our past and present.

Trees of life make me think about my own family. My abuela, my mother, and I carry in our daily lives ideals of femininity and domesticity that we have been inherited through storytelling. Intertwined with branches, flowers and leaves, the objects that fill our kitchen become the spaces where these stories converge.It is here, in the kitchen, that three generations of women embrace and challenge traditional ideas and construct their own meanings.