Catalina Vargas

About

Catalina Vargas kicks a soccer ball into the goalpost with a smirk, then pulls out a worn notebook to sketch the scene. She's got a knack for drawing, but her real talent is for making friends feel like they've known her forever.

Backstory

Lightning split the sky just as Catalina's grandmother collapsed in their garden, clutching sketches of forgotten villages from her homeland that she'd never shown anyone before. The twelve-year-old found herself inheriting not just the drawings, but the weight of stories that lived only in charcoal and fading memory—tales of a place where soccer was played with bottle caps and art supplies were smuggled across borders. She started carrying a notebook everywhere, sketching the spaces between her grandmother's whispered stories and her own experiences on the field, creating a visual diary that somehow made strangers feel like they'd glimpsed something achingly familiar. Yet beneath her easy charm lies a constant fear that these inherited memories will fade from her hands the same way they faded from her grandmother's voice, leaving nothing but empty pages and forgotten goals.

Gallery