They are in fact constructed in an intricate process in which hundreds of tiny glass beads, gemstones, and wool, silk, and cotton threads are laid down in hot, hand-gathered beeswax and piñon pitch. A lamp keeps the wax and pitch warm while Cuchama applies individual beads and threads with a toothpick.
 

Cuchama always begins with her subject’s eyes, enjoying the sensation that the figure she is creating is watching and participating in its own creation. She identifies herself as a santera, a maker of saints, and she considers all of her work to be devotional. Her work embraces popular culture as well as Catholic icons. She applies traditional methods to what some may think of as non-traditional subjects. Like her New Mexican / Native American contemporaries Marcus Ammerman and Diego Romero, Cuchama makes art that frequently reflects a trickster’s belly laugh and a thorough mastery of a demanding craft.
 

While visiting a friend and extending her nursing skills in Santiago-Ixquintla, Nayarit, Mexico, Cuchama observed world-famous yarn painter Mariano Valadez creating wonders of color and form while teaching his apprentices the Huichol yarn painting method. Typically, the subject of these creations are peyote visions, dreams, or petitions to the Great Mystery. Art, to the Huichol, is a religious experience. Not allowed any hands-on participation, Cuchama watched and asked questions.

After returning to the United States, the seed of religious expression lay dormant several years until a beekeeper friend, Magpie, gave her some beeswax and suggested that she try her hand on a simple design using the Huichol recipe. An Aztec artist and drum-maker, Guillermo Rosete, gave her broken drum pieces, which she began to use as tablas, canvases. She still occasionally creates drum pieces, feeling that they help to integrate her Native American and Catholic heritages. One of only a few traditional yarn painters in the United States today, Cuchama practices the Huichol method; however her visionary expression is far different from that of the peyote culture which spawned the technique.

Cuchama’s coming of age as an artist occurred at midlife. Her parents divorced when she was young. She never knew her father, and she was reprimanded every time she mentioned him. None of her relatives would give her any clue to his identity or the source of their disdain. Just before her mother died, she gave Cuchama a photograph of her father. He was Native American, and this was the source of her family’s shame. This new identity, discovered at midlife, was a major source of new direction.

Although she has so far been unable to locate her father or his family, Cuchama began to explore her Native American roots. She found herself accepted into several First Nations communities. She began to study indigenous religion. Participating in women's circles and connecting to elders at the Taos Pueblo, on several visits to New Mexico, she bagan to identify with the rich traditions of her heritage. It was at this point in her life that she experienced an epiphany on a mountaintop on the California-Mexico border that resulted in her taking the single appellative Cuchama, the name of the mountain.