Studio Vanessa Barragão is a design studio focusing on the artisanal techniques and wasted yarns from the industry to produce textiles and products for interiors. Growing up in the seaside, her connection to the ocean is the inspiration for her artworks. Vanessa Barragão’s work is characterized by her captivating environments of coral reefs, cleverly combining craft and recycled materials into unique and luxurious sculptural carpets and tapestries for floors and walls. Vanessa was born in Albufeira, in the south of Portugal. Her studio was founded in 2014 when she attended a Master degree at the 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. 

My work is an ongoing exploration across media, ranges from performance, drawing, painting, and photography. In my artistic practice, I contemplate about the role of materials,  various media, the body, and performative elements in the process of mark making gestures. I am interested in expressing ideas about how the notion of identity, displacement, and memory are held in the body.  I develop performative methods that break down boundaries between various disciplines. Through Inter-media performative practice, I incorporate the body as a material, object, and subject. I utilize the camera as a tool to capture and record my studio and staged performances, as well as activating time, space and light with body movement.
  I'm interested in the complexity of performative documentation, and the potential of both traditional and new advanced media in these representations. 

In 2017 I created DotPigeon, an artistic project that uses Instagram as a platform. Inspired by pop culture, politics, icons and trends of the moment, the idea behind my artworks remains the same: to twist images in order to create simple and comprehensible messages executed in a clean and visually satisfying way. The account reaches more than 40 thousand people and my works have been published by several online magazines, Instagram pages and newspapers (Forbes, ItsNiceThat, Fubiz, Popmyeyes, UrbanContest, Freeda, Designyoutrust, Designtaxi, Cnn, Darlin Magazine, Collater.al, Il Messaggero, Trendland, Picame Mag and many others).

Artist

Antidisciplinary artist and designer working from the bowels of Somerset House.