About commitment and learning from challenges — that’s what the journey of Carolina López and Julio Ríos, the hands behind the ceramics workshop Polimétria, has been all about. They are colleagues and spouses, and if they’ve managed to run a workshop together for over fifteen years, it’s because they’ve learned to balance craft and personal life, work and love.

They know that if they had each pursued the life of clay and fire on their own, they would have given up long ago. But let’s start at the beginning. Everything began with Carolina’s graduation project for her Fine Arts degree. She wanted to create life-sized human sculptures, but no one at her faculty in Manizales seemed to know how to advise her technically. The only one who decided to follow her lead was Julio, who a few years earlier had been her teaching assistant. With him came the questions — first, choosing the material, ceramics — and what followed was a year of dedicated research, a series of trials and errors, until they finally achieved what they had envisioned. That’s when they realized that, working together, their ideas came to life. Later came three months in Santa Marta’s Sierra Nevada, where they taught pottery to a Kogui community. They began by locating the clay veins, finding white, red, and yellow clays. Then came processing the raw material, teaching their apprentices how to knead it and shape it into pieces that had to be burnished — since there was no glaze — and fired in a communal kiln. Everything was done by hand: the kiln, the benches, the tables — working only with what they had. They even built a kick wheel, thanks to Julio’s carpentry skills and his tireless spirit.

“Don’t stay stuck on the problem — let’s find the solution.” That’s the motto Julio has taught Carolina from the very beginning. So after overcoming the challenges of her thesis and their time in the Sierra, life itself arranged the remaining pieces so they could build their own workshop and share with others what they had learned about ceramics. It happened that one of the sculptures from Carolina’s project was sent to an exhibition in Europe — and arrived there in pieces, shattered beyond repair. It couldn’t be shown. Fortunately, they had insured it before shipping, and they decided to invest the compensation in building and equipping their own studio — what today is Polimétria. They like to joke, half laughing, half nostalgic, that the sculpture sacrificed itself so they could keep creating ceramics — to make, to teach, and to experiment. It’s been more than ten years since then.

Through their work, they’ve come to understand the role each of them plays in the team. As they say, their temperaments complement each other. She’s the friendly face, while he’s more reserved; she invites chaos to inspire her, while he brings order and method to the mix. That’s why Carolina takes care of the public and dreams up new designs, and Julio keeps their feet on the ground by crafting formulas for clays and glazes — the foundation that keeps production running smoothly. She’s the kite, and he holds the string. And from that balance, we all get to enjoy the experience of making and learning how to turn an idea into reality at Polimétria’s workshop.

Walter’s drive—the brother who, even in his absence, taught him to grow again, to believe again, clinging to life like the tripa e’ perro vine, also called tripillo. Growing in the highlands above Cartago, it has become Fredy’s favorite raw material after years of working with cucharo and yaré. Tough and fibrous, it must be pulled from the trees it wraps around, peeled, and sorted before being turned into lamps, trunks, or Moses cradles—pieces that few still make today. It is this vine that echoes one of Fredy’s simplest yet most powerful ways of describing himself: “I was born inside a basket, and that’s where I’ve stayed.”