I started drawing at the age of fourteen and, a few years later, I started painting. Sculpture and furniture didn't come until later. I went to high school in Mexico and then moved to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, I created a portfolio for college and I applied to Cornish College in Seattle. I started in the fall of 1998 and, in 2002, I was awarded a full scholarship to go to VCU Sculpture for graduate school. In 2004, I moved to New York and my first job was for Matthew Barney, whose work I love and admire. I was curated into a group show in 2005 that led to a solo show in 2006. The sculpture sold and I started working full-time in the studio. In 2008, I made Avarice, which sold to the Brooklyn Museum and led to a series of shows with various galleries and museums. In 2012, I was commissioned by Sean Parker to create my largest work to date, which took two years to complete. By 2014, having just finished the commission, I started exploring furniture and loved it. In May 2014, I launched AMMA Studio, which leads to fusing my sculpture practice with a sculptural furniture company.
Only recently have I been able to see how the places I've lived in and how my family history has played a role in my work. It's hard to see it clearly, and until recently, I hadn't stepped back and looked at the entire body of work coupled with my life circumstances, which undoubtedly have changed, evolved and shaped my work in many different directions. For example, let’s take Mexico, which has an incredible history of making, building and crafting in such a rich and primitive manner, that I feel it's permeated my way of making and thinking. They build with cinder blocks, which starts to influence the form and shapes that they can explore. Usually, it's simplified geometries and large scale. I think this is naturally part of my practice, but I didn't really see it that way until recently, and now it seems entirely obvious.

It’s precisely because I don’t think about them as different categories. I've developed a language, and that language can expand and contract into many forms. The language of the rugs is influenced by the flatworks, the mirrors transform into rugs, while the furniture turns into sculptures, and the sculptures become paintings; it’s all connected. I can design a space, a building, a piece of furniture and cast the walls for the paintings to hang on. It's about language, and the language is materials, form, and content coming together to create something new and experimental.

They’re not really mirrors. I treat mirror like water and the sand transforms into a topographical landscape. And you're close, they’re based on glaciers breaking into water.

I’m constantly trying to evoke moments​ that relate to our connection with nature. Most of the people I've met have had a profound experience with nature, perhaps their most profound. This is true for me as well, thus making it less of a theme but rather a guide for expression. I'm connected to the works I make because I feel inspired when making things that are not only beautiful but have a serious point of view as well. The work speaks of the most pressing human issue, in my opinion: climate change. I make work as a relic for our time and the landscapes that may not exist in a not-so-distant future.

I love shaping every single piece of my work in the studio. I use sand, powdered glass, salt, silica, crushed porcelain and many, many other materials to express a sense of nature in organized organic minimalism. The materials allow the object to not reference nature alone but actually use it to express itself.

Swell is based on the pattern from an iceberg that was floating in the ocean and which experienced different layers of pollution through the years, by different particles getting trapped inside the ice. That seems grim, but it's almost as though beauty emerges from very tragic things. How it fits into a room is what I leave to the interior designers. If I were using it, I would probably want to hang it as a tapestry.

Patagonia. Hands down my first visit to Patagonia changed my life and work. The colours, the shapes, the diversity of landscapes, and the tragedy of the melting glaciers all combined has been the most poignant experience of my artistic life.

I'm looking forward to creating a new collection of furniture for 2019, which will begin pretty soon. Meanwhile, we're working on some very large-scale architectural works and getting ready for the second edition of In Good Company, a curated group show I host at my studio for emerging artists and designers every summer. The next phase of the studio is doing more experimental sculptural interiors that use all of the languages of sculptures and furniture in order to create one-of-a-kind spaces.