Fashion inspires each and every one of us in different ways: for example, her passion for this discipline led Vanessa Barragão to attend a Master in Fashion and Textile Design at Lisbon University.
After graduating, though, Barragão realised that fashion wasn't really her path, but remembered how much she loved her crocheting and knitting sessions as a child with her grandmothers. She therefore first explored the possibilities of yarns, creating artisanal and eco-friendly threads that she employed to make textiles.
Soon she decided to expand and five years ago she founded her own studio in Porto, where the country's textile industry is located. Here she started producing hand-made pieces employing a wide range of hand-crafted fiber art techniques, including tufting, crocheting, latch hooking, carving, embroidering and needle felting.
Inspired by her love of nature and the ocean (Barragão was born in the South of Portugal, on the seaside), she focused on making rugs and large wall tapestries and textile installations inspired by themes linked with the environment.
Barragão's three-dimensional underwater scenes have a great visual and tactile power and, if you stand in front of one of her pieces, you will definitely want to stretch your hand and touch the densely arranged protruding corals and sea anemones.
Yet, if you look a bit better you will realise that, quite often, her corals have lost their colours and they are made with white or ivory yarns. In this way the artist reminds us that the corals are being suffocated by the trash accumulating in the oceans and they are getting bleached of colour due to rising water temperatures.
Through her pieces Barragão also raises awareness to the conditions of the Earth's flora: her 12 metre-long tapestry on display during the summer at Terminal 2 at Heathrow Airport (a piece that aimed at raising funds for Kew Gardens), consisted in a map of the world that featured several threatened species of plants and flowers, among them the cypripedium calceolus and the pulsatilla vulgaris, the ginkgo biloba and the orchid bulbophyllum ankylochele. It took the artist 520 hours to make the botanical tapestry, eight kilograms of jute and cotton and forty-two kilograms of recycled wool.
This is actually a key aspect in Vanessa Barragão's works: as the textile industry is one of the most polluting in the world since it employs chemicals in different stages of production, requires a lot of energy and produces waste, Barragão has decided to employ in her pieces only materials from the deadstock of several local factories.
Last week her artworks were on display at the Context Art Miami fair, but art is not the only discipline Barragão she moves in: a while back she collaborated with architect Marta Figueiredo to create an interior design piece.
Entitled "Coral Moon" this composition, featuring two shifting half moon forms hinting at the tides and incorporating textiles, stone and brass, reminds us about the fragile balance of the coral reef ecosystem, and hopefully Barragão will develop more of such pieces with architects or interior designers.
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