Vanessa Donoso López

VANESSA DONOSO LÓPEZ (Barcelona, 1978)
"Compulsive Ruminative Thoughts"
63 ceramic pieces.
Measurements: 120 x 240 cm. (ceiling panel).

Ceramics, a central material in Vanessa Donoso’s practice, appear in this mural installation associated with repetition, bodily memory, and manual gesture. The 63 pieces function as signs, remnants, knots, beads, and ritual forms. They evoke processes of accumulation, persistent thought, and slow fabrication, in keeping with the work’s title. The open arrangement of the pieces suggests a mental map: a network of impulses, associations, and fragments that are ordered without being completely fixed.

Donoso López typically works with installation, materials, and collaborative processes, exploring notions of identity, transition, language, and belonging. In this work, the delicacy of the small pieces is a hallmark of the work, contrasting with the mural scale of the ensemble and creating a poetic and expansive presence. The result is a work of great formal sensitivity, where the intimate and the collective, the ornamental and the archaeological, the fragile and the persistent coexist in balance.

Vanessa Donoso López is an artist born in Barcelona in 1978, who lives between Dublin and Barcelona. She studied at the Escola d’Arts i Disseny Llotja in Barcelona, the University of Barcelona, and the Winchester College of Art in the United Kingdom. Her practice primarily encompasses installation, sculpture, ceramics, drawing, and collaborative projects.

She has exhibited at venues such as the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin; the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast; The LAB, Dublin; the Limerick City Gallery; the Instituto Cervantes in Dublin; Temple Bar Gallery + Studios; The Glucksman, Cork; and the Galería Herrero de Tejada, Madrid. She has carried out public projects and commissions for institutions such as the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Facebook Headquarters Europe, IDA Ireland, and the National Sculpture Factory/The Glucksman. Her work is linked to research on transcultural identity, material memory, repetition, displacement, and transformation.