Perla Valtierra | Finding Home in the Work: On Craft, Identity & Coming Back to Herself

What does it take to build a creative life when you don’t fit into any of the boxes the world gives you?

In this deeply honest and intimate conversation, ceramic artist and designer Perla Valtierra shares the story behind her unmistakable aesthetic — and the years of confusion, questioning, cultural dislocation, and rebuilding that shaped the woman and the work we know today.

Raised traveling through rural Mexico with her photographer father, Perla grew up guided by craft, markets, everyday objects, and the textures of real life — long before she realized these experiences would become the foundation of her design philosophy.

But her journey wasn’t linear.

In Europe she found herself misunderstood — too designer for the art world, too craft-rooted for design, too Mexican for the institutions that didn’t know how to place her. She didn’t fit their context. She didn’t fit their boxes. And she began to doubt her place entirely.

Yet that very displacement set the stage for her clarity.

A scholarship in Japan changed everything. Immersion in lineage, mastery, and cultural reverence helped her understand that there isn’t one way to create, one way to belong, or one scale at which craft becomes legitimate. She returned to Mexico with new language, new confidence, and a vision rooted in both heritage and innovation.