Laura never really liked the Industrial Design career she studied. She resented the hierarchy in which many designers position themselves above artisans and other makers, as though they are somehow the authorities, when, in fact, those artisans often know just as much—or more—than they do. She also felt uncomfortable with how artisans in impoverished communities were often exploited, with their knowledge extracted and repackaged as “fashion” or “innovation,” often at the expense of the tradition itself, which ended up threatened by the market logic.. These issues troubled her deeply, until she took a couple of classes that helped her put her many dilemmas into perspective: Critical Design and Social Design.

She found it almost unbelievable, for example, to be asked to design an appliance when there are still so many places in the country without electricity. So, when it came time to choose a thesis topic, it was only natural that she didn’t want to design products as the outcome of her research. Instead, she decided to focus on studying exactly what had been bothering her—so she could better understand it and, in turn, find the focus of her own work. Her goal was to raise awareness about the origins of things. In doing so, she followed her calling as an anthropologist. One of the exercises she did to trace these origins was to focus on bags. She thought it was the perfect object to demonstrate how we all use it without really knowing what it represents. To explore this, she asked a group of artisans to write insults in their symbols on the bags. No one would notice, just as no one notices the depth of their woven thoughts. She then traveled to El Carmen de Viboral, where she asked the makers of the region’s famous tableware to paint weapons instead of flowers on their ceramics, as a reference to the violence that had plagued that Antioquian town for years. She wanted to show that every handmade object carries a history and is not simply decorative.

Amidst these emotional whirlwinds, she found her way to clay, and, as a case study, to the pottery town of Ráquira in Boyacá. Through her travels and questions, she observed how this community, known for its craftsmanship, was also not immune to the very discussions she wanted to address. She watched with concern the standardization of glazed products—items that had little to do with Ráquira’s traditional pottery—and saw popular icons like Buzz Lightyear and Hello Kitty molded in clay, replacing the region’s iconic piggy banks. It was disheartening to witness how capitalism was slowly infiltrating even this village.

So, how could she translate these reflections into something practical? The first step, she realized, was to learn the craft itself. To honor it through her work. To slow down her thinking and turn the wheel to find meaning in the process. She had already studied jewelry design, where she focused on the symmetrical beauty of mushrooms, but it was with clay that she felt she could say something deeper. Through workshops with masters who showed her the wonders of the craft—where communication flows through the hands rather than through words—she knew, deep down, that this was where she wanted to spend the rest of her life. “I want to resist,” she told herself. And so, she made a conscious decision not to act as an intermediary with artisans from other communities, so she wouldn’t impose anything on them. She also chose to work with unglazed clay, so that people would know they were holding something made from the earth, something that grounded them as they touched her pieces. Finally, she made it a point to always tell the story of her raw materials—clay from Ciudad Bolívar, an area known for brickmaking, but also a neighborhood that grew disordered because of necessity. Through her pieces, Laura tells stories—the stories of the neighborhood, the colors of the city, the land with its history. And she makes tableware like sculptures, always ensuring that she feels the earth in her hands.