Vanessa Barragão (1992, born in Albufeira, Portugal, where she currently lives and works) has transformed her passion for crochet and drawing into an artistic practice focused on the natural environment. The manual dimension of making is, for the artist, a way to connect with Nature and to translate into material form the memory of the places where she grew up. Albufeira, a city overlooking the ocean, played a fundamental role in her artistic development: the sea, the coastline, and the surrounding countryside serve as constant sources of inspiration. Both marine and rural environments resurface in her works as vibrant, living textile ecosystems where the organic and the inorganic are woven together.
Her textile series explicitly reference the plant and natural world. Using materials such as wool, jute, canvas, and fabric, she recreates microcosms of flowers, plants, corals, and algae. The softness and elasticity of the fibers imbue the works with a vital, almost animated quality. From the interlacing of threads emerge phyto- and biomorphic organisms that seem to breathe.
In the Picos series—“picos” meaning “peaks” or “summits” in Portuguese—Barragão evokes the natural environments found on mountain tops or hills, as well as along riverbanks. The surfaces of these compositions become populated with mosses, lichens, fungi, shrubs, and small streams of water: a miniature landscape, dense with material and colour, that seems to expand beyond the edges of its support.
In Picos II, the artist creates a large vertical rug suspended from a rod, onto which she hand-sews and embroiders plant forms in various shades of green, made of wool, jute, and lyocell. Small red tufts with white dots also appear, evoking the caps of Amanita muscaria, the iconic poisonous mushroom. The work unfolds—quite literally—from the wall to the floor, suggesting the movement of flowing water in a stream or creek, along which the artist places elements that recall stones and pebbles. The different textures and densities of the textiles convey the richness and complexity typical of natural ecosystems.
Standing before a work by Vanessa Barragão means being transported into a universe where textile matter transforms into a living landscape, and where natural—yet reimagined—forms made of fabric acquire the ability to breathe, grow, and pulse like real organisms.
PICOS II
2023
Vanessa Barragão,
Materials: Wool, lyocell, jute (canvas), brass (signature badge) Techniques: Hand tufted
Dimensions: 270 x 450 cm
Copyright 2023 StudioVB ©All Rights Reserved
19/11/25
