Reflecting her experiences growing up in Barcelona and living in Ireland for over twenty years, Vanessa Donoso López’s practice explores identity, migration, and cultural behaviours shaped by relocation. Her research on ‘transitional phenomena’ refers to the developmental space between internal and external reality, where creativity and culture take form, and identities and relationships are negotiated through objects, gestures, and shared practices. She uses primordial and attainable materials like clay, soil and stones to examine how traditions, language and values adapt across cultures over time.
Donoso López’s exhibition explores movement as a strategy for adaptation, resistance and transformation, bringing together many material processes including low-fired ceramics, natural pigments, water and living plants. The resulting immersive installation includes a large number of ceramic vessels, objects, glazing and firing samples, dyed fabrics and research materials, and creates a sensitive ecosystem in a state of ongoing change.
The microhabitats that make up the installation, mineral pigments used to dye fabric, and add new colour to porous clays from different locations, speak to the permeability of contemporary ecosystems.
Through this process, objects and their surfaces are transformed, making visible the influence of external factors on material forms, echoing the ways people in transit adapt to and reshape their surroundings.
The exhibition is accompanied by a commissioned text by Caterina Almirall with translations in English, Catalan and Spanish.
Vanessa Donoso López (O-O-O) is supported by an Arts Council Project Award and continues at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios until September 20th.
