The beauty and feminity of each piece is what attracted my attention when I first saw Valeria's work in Palm Springs, California. It felt as if I were reading a lovely poem directly from the gallery's wall.
Valeria was born in Brazil and spent her childhood on a farm, giving rise to an affection and fascination with natural forms that inspires her delicate, whisper-thin, white ceramics. So thin as to resemble paper, their jagged edges and cool whiteness give the impression of hardness at first, but the creamy off-white and shadows cast inside the ceramic hollows instead give off a soft, comforting warmth.
Each piece is made from dozens or hundreds of hand-formed ceramic shapes which are combined into small or large, wall-spanning works that take months to assemble. A remarkable gentleness emanates from each piece.
Trained as an architect, she instead became fascinated by ceramics and worked as a ceramic artist in Brazil through the 1990s, moved to London in 1999, and has been represented by the Woolff Gallery since 2007. Her architectural training reappears through repetitive sequences and structures, where tiny individual hand-rolled cones are repeated for many metres, resembling coral reefs, sea anemones, tiny poppy flowers, leaves, petals, or pods.
Valeria has created work for luxury brands such as Chanel, Wedgewood, Tiffany and Co's stores in London's Canary Wharf and Montreal, Canada, and for many interior designers. Her work hangs in Somerset House, and has appeared as part of exhibitions at London's V&A Museum and the Museo Historico Nacional in Río de Janeiro, Brazil.
Nascimento lives and works in southwest London.
VALERIA
NASCIMENTO
her porcelain beauties
here
Perreault Magazine - 20 -
by Brigitte Perreault