Meet Clarice Tara Cuda

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Clarice Tara Cuda a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Clarice , we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

Resilience.
What a personal question!
I look at how my body heals, how nature heals, how my heart has healed.
Life in itself is resilient.

I think my resilience comes from a place of awareness and gratitude for the limited time I have here on Earth, in this body.
We all have to survive our childhood, survive the various challenges that life, and death, and everything in between bring.
Simultaneously, I believe that Life doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle.

I learned to swim in the ocean. I had to remember to dive below the waves. When you see a wave coming, and it’s small enough, you can jump it, rise with it, descend with it. If it’s too big you dive straight into it, pass through its intensity. But sometimes you don’t see it coming, and it crashes into you, taking you down to the sandy floor in its spiral, spitting you out on the shore with the burn of salt coming out your nose. My breath was always deeper after those moments, and I always returned to the water.

When I was five I experienced a category 5 hurricane while living in St.Thomas. I remember seeing this black wind swirling through the window. I remember seeing huge sail boats washed far inland resting on the streets, flattened buildings, and needing to move because my school was destroyed. It was an incredible amount of devastation. I don’t remember feeling fear, but I do remember feeling sad seeing so much loss, and Life continued.

I pull the majority of my resilience from the moments that have almost broken me, and how I had to continue moving. Even in the most chaotic, challenging, and painful moments, time keeps moving, although it does move differently, and so do we.

Maybe there’s something in that, as to why practicing moments of stillness are so important to me, but even then my breath is still moving, my blood is still moving, the world is still moving.

While I don’t know that I need to get into the grit of my journey to articulate my resilience, I will say that I am lucky to be alive.
I have also experienced the passing of several people I love deeply, all at different times, in different ways. But each of those losses greatly expanded me, made me want to live my life more fully, more passionately, in honor of their memory. They also broke me, and made me learn how to heal and continue forward.

Loss and grief have come in waves.
So has love and magic.
And I keep moving.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I am an artist. I love making.
I can’t help it.
It’s in the way I observe and perceive the world around me.
It is a desire to both understand my own existence and connect to others through an expression of personal and shared experiences.
My work helps me to process through the process.
I am meticulous. I like detailed and repetitive things. I make things that are a little bit strange and sometimes uncomfortable, but always layered with beauty and care.

Drawing was my first love, then I found sculpture, and performance.
Recently I’ve been exploring ceramics and am increasingly curious about the power of sound and vibration.
I have always been drawn to the body. I can’t escape it.
Even if I remove the figure, I still end up making work that is connected to, or explores the fleshy vehicles we inhabit.
I am fascinated with hair and its innate materiality, and how it exists in a space between life and death.

I gave birth to my first daughter 16 months ago. So, my work right now is exploring this complex and unfamiliar terrain that is Motherhood. Before my her, my work was my baby, so it’s an interesting thing I’m experiencing. Sometimes it feels like existing in two places simultaneously. The relationship with my practice is shifting. That intense love that dedicated to my work has expanded to hold this new love of my child.

I think there are different ways to approach making. Some artists that I deeply admire have a practice that is very consistent, almost every day they’re in the studio.
My rhythm is different. Its like the ocean with its rises and falls in momentum.
Now, I am constantly looking, seeing, observing, analyzing, witness, swallowing the world around me.
I see beauty in the majority of life.
I’ve noticed a pattern within myself, Its the ocean pattern.
A swell of creative energy rises and I produce a lot of work in a condensed amount of time through long hours, days, and weeks, and then the rest period comes. I still, I observe, I witness, it gathers, it builds, and then I produce again.
I need time in between.

Making always feels like a collaboration between the work and myself. We meet in the middle and dance together for a while, birth something new, and then the work goes off into world, like a child flying the nest.

I came to Las Vegas thinking I would do one semester and transfer to a larger university somewhere maybe in the pacific north west. But I fell in love with the Arts community here. I earned my B.F.A. in Fine Arts from the UNLV in 2019 and now I’m here pursing my M.F.A from the same school. 11 years in this neon desert. My solo Mid-way show will be this November 2024 and my Thesis will open December of 2025.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

1.Patience
2.Trust
3.Gratitude

Patience. We have to be patient with the process. This falls in line with the creative process, with learning anything new, and honestly, with just with day to day living. I think cultivating a heathy relationship with patience is connected to peace and perseverance. I like to believe that life is always happening as it should. So within that I don’t like to rush things. Growing takes time, healing takes time, falling in love takes time. Its that whole idea of enjoying the journey. I worked in a tattoo shop when I was 18 and had to sit and draw portraits for 8hrs a day, 5 days a week. I used a process called the grid method, and would work in little half inch squares, one at a time, rendering out the image. I had to learn how to slow down, to be present with what I was actually looking at, rather than what I thought I was drawing. This taught me to see in a different way, to be more observant of the world around me. As advice, finding ways to pull yourself into the present moment, such as focusing on the patterns, sounds, and smells around you can pull you into a place of peace. When we’re in this space, we’re not seeking we’re just enjoying the moment. Here time moves differently, and before you know it you’ve spent hours, or walked miles, or learned a new skill. Without time being the focused thing, we’re able to actually experience.

2. Trust. Trust the process. Life is happening as it should. I remind myself of this when everything is working out wonderfully, and when it feels like the world is on fire. I don’t think we can be anywhere we are not meant to be. Sometimes this is hard to swallow, especially in the really trying, painful, difficult moments. But, often those moments become great teachers, or propel some kind of personal growth. When I think of it in regards to making, with almost every piece of work I experience what I call the ugly phase. This is the point somewhere in the middle. The piece starts and I love it, then the ugly phase hits and I hate it, I question if I even know how to make art anymore, and then I have patience and keep going. I trust the process. The piece grows. I have to give it the chance to work through the ugly, to build, to grow, to expand, transform. Its always a collaboration between me and the work, and we have to trust each other. Life is like this too. I have to allow the ugly moments to do their work, and give them the opportunity to grow into something new, maybe even beautiful.

3. Gratitude. There is always going to be something that could be better, could be more. Things could always be worse too. When I take the time to look at all the things I have to be grateful for, I realize I am abundant, I am rich, I am wealthy. Maybe not in the traditional sense, but in a way that changes how I move throughout my day. It’s not about the things I have, or money in the bank. Its the attitude I choose to charge things with. My dad and I talk almost every morning, and we talk about the power of being grateful. When I am grateful, I feel safe. I know that sounds like a strange thing to say. But when I am in a space of gratitude, I am aware of everything thing that life has blessed me with, I feel cared for, and trust that life is working its course, we are working together. You can have tons of things and be empty, or you can have nothing and feel full. Its about where we choose to place our perspective, and then hopefully we balance some place in between.

All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?

Motherhood.

I’ve experienced my share of hard things. But nothing has been as challenging as starting a family.
It is beautiful, empowering, exhausting, and disorienting. And not just during labor. In fact labor (in all its earth shattering sublimity) is probably the most manageable part. It’s the next year that is the most radical. It is full of awe, wonder, and terror. (I say this all with a smile). My daughter is my greatest teacher. She challenges me in the most beautiful and powerful ways. All the self introspection and work I had thought I’d done for the past 33years felt like it went out the window. Here I am learning all over again. There’s so much vulnerability and strength living together in one shifting body.

Parenthood will bring up any unresolved issues that you still need to work through. It will make you question what you find important in yourself, in the world, in each moment. I never experienced real anxiety until now. No one could have told me- how motherhood completely transforms you. Not just physically, but mentally, spiritually, energetically. Its like an intense psychedelic journey that just continues to undulate. I find myself questioning everything about who I am, who I was, who I am becoming. And then… my daughter reaches up, cries her powerful cry, smiles and laughs, throws her arms around me, and I realize I am witnessing the miraculous, who just dumped a bowl of yogurt on the floor. All the more incredible is that, this is how we all got here. Through our parents each in our tiny vessels. Wow. How incredible. Every day is new.

How am I facing it? With wide open arms (most of the time), and the support of my family. It is challenging, especially while in graduate school, but I keep saying I am in a strength and conditioning period of my life. I am learning as I go. I remind myself that I do have tools from all these years figuring it out. The biggest one being my artistic practice, followed by Self-Love/ Self-Care, Grace, Patience, Gratitude, and using my voice to ask for help when I need it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ClariceTaraCuda.com
• Instagram: @ClariceTara

Image Credits

Amanda Keating