Vanessa Donoso López

Reflecting her experiences growing up in Barcelona and living in Ireland for over twenty years, Vanessa Donoso López’s practice explores identity, migration, and cultural behaviours shaped by relocation. Her research on ‘transitional phenomena’ refers to the space between internal and external reality, where creativity and culture take form, and identities and relationships are negotiated through objects, gestures, and shared practices. She uses primordial and attainable materials like clay, soil and stones to examine how traditions, language and values adapt across cultures.

Donoso López’s exhibition explores movement as a strategy for adaptation, resistance and transformation, bringing together many material processes including low-fired ceramics and natural pigments, with water, living plants and sound. An immersive installation with a large number of ceramic vessels creates a sensitive ecosystem in a state of ongoing change.

The microhabitats that are integrated within and around the ceramics, and mineral pigments used to dye fabric and add new colour to porous clays from different locations, speak to the permeability of contemporary ecosystems.

Through this process, objects and their surfaces are transformed, making visible the influence of external factors on material forms, echoing the ways people in transit adapt to and reshape their surroundings.

Vanessa Donoso López’s recent solo exhibitions include: dlr LexIcon Gallery, Dún Laoghaire (2025); Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin (2011–2022); Galeria Herrero de Tejada, Madrid (2021); Candyland, Stockholm (2017); The LAB, Dublin (2016); Limerick City Gallery (2015).

This exhibition is supported by an Arts Council Project Award.