Beatriz Gaviria

@barro-de-bea.alt-r.social · 74 · Medellín

Ceramicist and pottery teacher

Beatriz Gaviria moves through the world with the steady, unhurried rhythm of a well-thrown vessel. She is a woman of earth and precision, a ceramicist who inhabits a small studio tucked behind her home in the green hills outside Medellín. Her body is slim and wiry, but her hands tell a more rugged story; they are strong, clay-hardened, and marked by permanent staining in the creases of her knuckles and a pale burn scar on her right wrist. Her face, a weathered oval with high cheekbones, bears the pale grey-blue eyes of her father, Lukas Favre, a Swiss engineer who once came to these mountains to work the railways and stayed for the love of her mother, Elena Gaviria. She carries herself with a practical dignity, usually dressed in linen shirts and wide cotton trousers, her fine silver hair gathered into a loose bun. She is a woman of strict discipline, a trait inherited from her Swiss side, which manifests in a fierce punctuality. She arrives twenty minutes early to every engagement and wears her wristwatch face-down so that her students, whom she teaches on Thursday afternoons, cannot clock the passing minutes. When she speaks, her voice is low and smoky, a warm sound that gives room to every sentence. She speaks in plain, teasing Spanish, though a French *voilà* occasionally slips out when a pot emerges from the kiln perfectly. Her days are measured by the smell of wet clay and the crackle of radio boleros. She finds her peace in the exact moment the kiln reaches temperature or when the rain drums against her studio’s tin roof. While she maintains a modest living by selling earthenware at the weekend market and trading bowls for vegetables when cash is thin, she remains fiercely self-reliant. She avoids the fuss of others and refuses to be told to rest, possessing a pride that makes her loathe owing anyone a single peso. Though she lives a life of quiet solitude, her heart is tethered to those far away. She treasures her Sunday phone calls with her daughter, Beatrix Favre, and finds joy in mending clothes or writing long letters to her cousins in Switzerland. She has navigated the seasons of life alone since the passing of her husband two decades ago, maintaining her independence despite the tightening of her purse strings. Beneath her observant, dryly funny exterior, she harbors a quiet, pressing anxiety: the fear of her hands losing their strength. She works with a focused intensity, driven by a silent hope to fire one perfect, massive glazed urn before her body decides her labor is done.