Claudia Huenchuleo Paquien earned her psychology degree from Universidad de Concepcion, Chile, and set straight to work to improve her local community. Rather than opt into a traditional clinical psychologist role, Claudia focused her efforts on community psychology.

From 1996 to 2005, she took on roles that had meaningful impacts on the communities she served; including such organizations as Fundación para la Superación de la Pobreza, the United Nations Development Program in Chile, the Ford Foundation and the Inter-American Development Bank. These projects all focused on community development with an emphasis on poverty reduction in rural areas of Chile.

“It was very exciting to work with the civic society in Chile through grassroots organizations,” Claudia explains. ”This work put me in touch with people from a wide range of disciplines such as geography, sociology, architecture and engineering, all working to address social justice issues from different perspectives.”

During this time, Claudia began to explore art through group psychoanalysis, finding it to be an important form of self-expression and communication.

Art Moves Beyond Passion

While traveling in Mexico, Claudia met her husband and while living there, spent time studying ceramics at the Instituto Nacional de Bella Artes in San Miguel De Allende. After living in Mexico and then in Chile, Claudia and her husband relocated to the Bay Area.

“It was really hard in the sense that I never expected to live in the United States and needed to learn English to be at the same professional level that I was in Chile,” Claudia recalls. “I spent the first three years in the U.S. taking ESL classes.”

Committed to her professional success, Claudia began to work at local nonprofit organizations—Wu Yee Children’s Services, Feed the Hunger Foundation and The Women’s Building—adding on to her years of experience collaborating with grassroot organizations and immigrant communities.

Improving her now-new community by day, Claudia spent nights and weekends kindling her inner passion for art. Classes on loom weaving evolved into an interest in digital photography—the artist began to emerge.

“I knew that UC Berkeley Extension had a program that specialized in digital photography. I was taking non-credit classes, and one day my instructor asked me why I wasn’t taking the classes for credits as I was a really good student. I thought, ‘Yeah, why not?’  I had already completed half of the visual arts program when I applied to the post-bacc in visual arts and was accepted. One year later, I graduated from the program.”

The certificate—through the more theoretical classes such as art history and theory of art—gave me the foundation to begin exploring art based on conceptual research and identity politics from my Mapuche heritage. I knew from the beginning that I would like to dive into the complexities of being an indigenous person in the world.

Classes Illuminate Artistic Vision

Exploring her numerous talents throughout the Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Visual Arts brought out the artist within—as well as tap into her self-identity:

“The certificate—through the more theoretical classes such as art history and theory of art—gave me the foundation to begin exploring art based on conceptual research and identity politics from my Mapuche heritage. I knew from the beginning that I would like to dive into the complexities of being an indigenous person in the world.

“I am a transdisciplinary artist, so I work based on concepts and then I try to see what medium would best express the ideas that I would like to communicate or the questions I want to pose,” she continues. “I am interested in ethical and political concerns and conditions in relation to geopolitics and the experience of contemporary indigeneity, specifically those linked to my Mapuche heritage.

“I use collage, photography, sculpture, sound installation, video performance, et cetera. In the cases when I don't know a certain medium, I work in collaboration with other artists. For example, in my work In Defiance of Gravity, They Rise, a piece in augmented reality, I worked with interdisciplinary artist Jeffrey Yip to create a beautiful choreography of foye tree leaves collected at the San Francisco Botanical Garden. You can also see this work on my website.”

Claudia took the next level in her artistic endeavors by attending San Francisco State University’s Master of Fine Arts program—which she recently completed. “What really inspired me to continue with grad school was the fact that I love art history and theory of art. The post-bacc program was very good at motivating me to realize my dream of making art professionally. It gave me tools to project a new career based on the larger context—historical, political, personnel, psychological."

I hope, in a way, that this work opens up conversations about how we relate in a more conscious way to the places where we live and the resignification of historical places.

Claudia’s passion when asked about her inspiration for her work comes out like a stream of consciousness:

“My projects depart from places in the Bay Area—like the coast, the balcony of my house, the Pacific Ocean—and connect with the territory in the region where I was born, specifically Mapuche territory. For my Embodied Resistance Series, I visited the Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park and I saw a Foye tree, also known as canelo (Drimys Winteri) for the first time in my life. It is a tree of deep cultural, medicinal, political and spiritual significance for the Mapuche people.

“That encounter opened up opportunities for me to explore larger topics like imperialism and colonialism. The tree became a collaborator and allowed me to reflect on various themes that gave birth to my thesis project, Lof in Transit, and a larger body of work.

“I'm currently applying to an open call in Chile for art actions reflecting on the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup. I proposed a dialogue between two geographic locations, Alcatraz and Quiriquina Island, which have histories as military prisons and concentration camps. I hope, in a way, that this work opens up conversations about how we relate in a more conscious way to the places where we live and the resignification of historical places.”

Take a look at pieces from Claudia's Embodied Resistance Series:

Embodied Resistance Series: Kiñe, Epu, Küla, Meli (2021—2022), foye branches collected at the San Francisco Botanical Garden, archival inkjet print, 30” x 20”