Vanessa Barragão
Biography
Vanessa was born in Albufeira, in the south of Portugal. Her studio was founded in 2014 when she attended a Master’s degree at Lisbon University in fashion and textiles design. There she developed her first wool yarn collection and tapestries through an ecological artisanal process. Currently, she is based in Porto, the Northern region of Portugal where the nation’s textile industry core is located and divides her time between collaborating as a textile designer for an artisanal rugs factory and running her studio.
Vanessa’s artworks focus on textile industry pollution and how it is deeply affecting coral reef environments. She believes in an upcycling effort and conscious production methods in an attempt to fight this negative mindset and improve our Earth’s health. All the materials used come from the deadstock of a specific artisanal rug factory in Beiriz, which is first cleaned and then selected to recycle and reused in her projects. Her production tries to be the most eco-friendly as possible, using ancestral and handmade techniques, like latch hook, hand-tuft, embroidery, felt and crochet, to create her artworks.
Full Moon is a sensorial rug with quite a unique goal: to make people feel like they are in harmony within their own universe and totally focused on themselves.
For the artist, the surface of the Moon represents a tranquil place with its particular lack of sound and gravity, and to find a similar environment on Earth, one must dive deep into the ocean.
The shapes of this rug are inspired by the different blurs of the Moon’s gravity field and the coral reefs of the sea. The surface of the Full Moon rug is filled with tons of textures which can be seen and felt by the different quality of materials and in the details of little crochet urchins inserted in different sculpted levels of hand-tuft.
