Emma Cecilia Ferreira was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, in 1946. Her sculpture works on abstraction, continuous movement, minimalism and the spatial use of color. It began in wood and moved later into polychrome resin, fiberglass and metal steelroads. Many of the pieces are monumental. All of them are built to resolve differently from every angle, so that the viewer who walks around one is never looking at the same composition twice.

She spent her early childhood in Colombia, attended part of high school in the United Kingdom and then moved to the United States, where she studied. That early crossing between countries set the pattern of a life lived between cultures.

She enrolled at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York. Her mentor in the art department was Sam Hudson, himself a pupil of the American sculptor Peter Agostini, and he shaped her earliest sense of what a sculpture could be. She studied ceramics with Geraldine Nash and metalsmithing with Professor Lynn Duggan. The work she made in those years already combined organic and geometric form, and the biomorphic side of it would become central later on. She graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in 1984.

Her first studio was in Rochester. Noise restrictions made sculpture impossible there, so she turned to oil painting and watercolor and used them to investigate color and gesture. That studio became a first laboratory of form. She later spent a brief period at the Art Students League in Manhattan, working on printmaking.

In 1990, after twenty-three years abroad, she returned to Colombia and set up a studio in Sesquilé, on the rural Sabana de Bogotá. The space was large, surrounded by nature and free of restrictions, and her practice opened up. The work grew monumental. She had access to local woods and a climate that allowed her to carve outdoors, and over the following decade she produced more than fifty wooden sculptures. Between 1990 and 1993 she worked Colombia’s native woods, abarco, local ash (urapán) cedar and cypress, with hammer and chisel. The starting point was always a three-dimensional maquette read against the intrinsic form of the trunk.

Private collectors and Colombian universities began acquiring the work during those years, among them the Universidad de los Andes and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. The sculptures went into shared campus spaces, where they became part of daily life.

She moved to Costa Rica in 2000 and built another studio surrounded by nature. The alternating six-month cycles of humidity and dryness cracked the wood, and she began working with steel rods, fiberglass and polychrome resin. The change widened her palette and made. From that point color stopped being a surface treatment. It became a structural agent that modulates how volume and depth are perceived.

She has never worked from molds. Forms return across the years, each is built from scratch by hand, from the raw block or the bare armature, with the scale, the proportions or the material shifted along the way. No sculpture is an exact copy of another.

Between 2006 and 2016 she divided her time between Costa Rica and Spain. In Spain she set up a painting studio and returned to color and gesture in two dimensions. Tacacorí, her first collection of constructed works in cocobolo wood, comes from the Costa Rican studio of this period. In 2014 a degenerative eye condition required four surgeries, and the recovery slowed the rhythm and the scale of her sculpture. She relocated permanently to Madrid in 2016, closing the Costa Rican workshop and keeping the painting studio in Segovia.

Her first exhibition was held in 1994 at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bucaramanga, which acquired a work for its permanent collection the following year. The Universidad de los Andes began incorporating her sculptures in 1997 and holds one of the most extensive institutional collections of her work. In 2001 the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Bogotá mounted a retrospective covering more than a decade, including the Totems series, a tribute to the paintings of Egon Schiele. A five-year retrospective of her Central American work followed in 2004 at the Audi Center in Costa Rica, curated by Klaus Steinmetz.

In 2005 she took part in Women in Sculpture, A Vision for the Future, curated by the sculptor Aquiles Jiménez at the Editus Academy of Arts in Costa Rica. Writing about the show, the art historian Luis Ferrero singled out the organic abstraction of her pieces and the way they recall Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth while being reinterpreted through her own focus on surface, color and sinuous movement, noting the lyrical energy of the work and the balance it strikes between sensuality and formal rigor. That same year she began a long association with INCAE Business School, which acquired works for its campuses in Alajuela and Managua. In 2006 Eastern Connecticut State University acquired a substantial group of her sculptures for permanent display, among them the tallest piece she has made, four meters high, housed in the Fine Arts Instructional Center.

Her style moved from the early influences of Cubism and biomorphism, identified by the Colombian art critic Germán Rubiano-Caballero in her first works, toward a language of fluid form and open abstraction. She prefers to leave the sculptures untitled, identified by their completion dates, so that nothing stands between the viewer and the piece. As she put it in a 2005 interview: «I am creating abstract forms that anyone has the right to interpret. I don’t want to tell the viewer what they should or shouldn’t see.»