Fabiola De la Cueva: The Art of Letting Go

Fabiola De la Cueva is a ceramic artist and engineer whose work explores the frontier between order and chaos, precision and surrender. Her practice centers on surface decoration, tessellation, repetition, and mirrored geometries that evoke ancient geometric designs, biomorphic rhythms, and the quiet poetry of pattern. Whether working with clay, embroidery, or painted forms, she is drawn to the meditative act of identifying, analyzing, recreating, and repeating motifs that build complexity from simple units.

Her process is deeply informed by engineering, chemistry, and material science. She prepares her own clay bodies, terra sigillata, and glazes. Not to control the outcome, but to encourage it. “You can encourage, but you cannot control,” she says. Ceramics demands presence and humility. The kiln becomes a collaborator, introducing imperfections that elevate the work beyond what precision alone can achieve. Clay, she notes, “talks back”, revealing what you tried to glaze over only in the final firing.

Fabiola’s work is also a spiritual practice, though not in the religious sense. Inspired by Persian poetry and sacred geometry, she sees making as a way to connect with something larger than herself. Her community tile projects, such as those created during Geometry Drawing Retreats, embody this ethos: each tile is unique, perfect and imperfect, part of a fleeting whole that dissolves after the firing. These moments, captured in clay and flame, are reminders of our shared humanity.

Her influences span Islamic geometric patterns, philosophy, engineering, and ADHD itself. Clay offers endless rabbit holes of learning and experimentation, keeping her curiosity alive and her dopamine flowing. She jokes that she once turned a personality disorder into a successful business, but now sees clay as the medium that allows her to flourish, to teach, and to create with joy.

At its heart, her work is about The Art of Letting Go, about creating something that makes you smile, and sharing that moment with others. Even in her brightest pieces, she hides a touch of black, a quiet nod to the darker spaces she’s moved through, and a reminder that joy is not the absence of struggle, but the light we carry through it.

Fabiola is a generous teacher and collaborator, known for her ability to distill complex techniques and share them freely. Whether leading workshops or contributing to international ceramics congresses, she believes knowledge should never be hoarded. “If it stays in my head, it turns to ash,” she says. Her vision for the future includes a studio space where artists and engineers can co-create, solve problems, and nourish both sides of their practice, without burning out.

She is, unapologetically, both an artist and an engineer. And she is enough.