Artist Highlight - Kelly Cruz Gonzalez

1. Rooftopscape comes from the self-built landscapes of Lima’s hillsides. What memories of those rooftops stayed with you most strongly?

I remember making the connection that this could be something to use in my design practice while I was in a tall building in the centre of Lima, at the same height of these hills. From that vantage point, I got myself watching a cat going around a very cluttered rooftop, it was a whole world! There were characters, fixed elements, and others unique to each house. An element that comes to me are the steel rods from columns left exposed on the azoteas. For the family, maybe they are the hope of building another storey for their house but for the cat, they are a playground.

2. Your piece sits somewhere between storage, cabinet, architectural model and landscape. Do you think of it more as furniture or as a remembered place?

I think of it as both, but it always begins as furniture. I give myself a brief: I will make a chair, I will make a cabinet. It has a function. However, it comes from somewhere, and the form carries this memory that drives my pencil. I am not trying to make a scale model of a house that already exists and then force a function onto it. It is more that the furniture typology cannot help but have something from me, and I cannot help if the language I grew up seeing comes into it.

3. Storage is usually hidden and practical, but here it becomes sculptural and emotional. What does it mean for an object to store memory as well as belongings?

I think it makes the act of storing more deliberate. It gives more weight to the choice of what to keep, because the object is not only practical but also carries meaning. Maybe that also makes you want to keep the piece for a longer time, and that is what I like about furniture: it can be more long-lived. In a way, it becomes a small resistance to fast furniture, or fast anything. The piece does not only hold belongings; over time, it also becomes part of what is being stored.

4. The work has precise construction, but it also carries the feeling of improvisation. How do you balance control with the visual language of informal architecture?

It is harder than it seems, because in woodworking the “error” cannot simply be forced or performed; it has to be decided, measured and made. So the improvisation is visual, but the construction still needs control. The balance also comes from me. I am from Latin America, but I studied architecture and have lived in New York and Europe, so there is also a language of industrial, orderliness and international design in the work. Both things happen at the same time: the precise object and the memory of informal architecture.

5. Migration sits quietly behind the collection. Has moving between Peru, New York and London changed the way you remember built environments?

Yes, moving has made memory more selective. Certain sensations become stronger when I am far away: the density of a place, its rhythms, the way people build and decorate over time, and the small details that once felt ordinary. Living in different cities has also made me more aware of how built environments carry social and emotional histories.

I do not remember Lima as a fixed image, but through fragments. The Roofscapes collection comes from that distance: it is not a direct replica, but a something new shaped by memory.

6. The rough metal details feel like traces of use, weather and accumulation. How important is surface in making the piece feel lived in?

Surface is very important to me because it can hold a sense of time. I was interested in avoiding something too polished, and instead allowing the materials to retain some irregularity, contrast and depth. The metal, the routed surfaces and the timber each respond differently to light and touch, which gives the piece a more inhabited quality. I think those small variations are what stop it from feeling like a separate object and make it feel closer to something that has already had a life.

7. Barriadas are often shaped by necessity and adaptation. How do you avoid romanticising that condition while still recognising its resilience?

This is something I think, and approached, about carefully. I am not trying to, interested in aestheticizing precarity, or in separating these environments from the conditions that produce them. What draws me to them is the spatial intelligence behind the way people adapt, build and make use of what is available. There is a great deal of authorship in those decisions, even when they happen outside formal architectural systems. For me, the work is about recognising that intelligence and giving it space within design, without simplifying the realities it comes from.

8. What do you hope viewers recognise in Rooftopscape, even if they do not know Lima?

I hope viewers recognise a sense of place, even if they cannot name it. I would like the piece to feel familiar in some way, as though it carries traces of somewhere lived, remembered or imagined. There is something in the language of rooftops, additions and things made gradually over time that extends far beyond Lima; you can recognise similar ways of building and adapting environments in many parts of the world. Even without knowing its specific references, I hope people can connect to the idea that environments are shaped through use, necessity and personal decisions. I would rather the work create that recognition and curiosity than explain itself too completely.