elements

Valeria Nascimento was born in Brazil (1962) and spent her childhood on a farm, giving rise to an affection and fascination with natural forms that inspires her delicate, whisper-thin, white ceramics. Each piece is made from dozens or hundreds of hand-formed ceramic shapes which are combined into small or large, wall-spanning works that take months to assemble.

Nascimento has created work for luxury brands such as Chanel, Wedgewood, Tiffany and Co's stores in London's Canary Wharf and Montreal, Canada, and for many interior designers. Her work hangs in Somerset House, and has appeared as part of exhibitions at London's V&A Museum and the Museo Historico Nacional in Río de Janeiro, Brazil.
Trained as an architect, Nascimento instead became fascinated by ceramics and worked as a ceramic artist in Brazil through the 1990s, moved to London in 1999, and has been represented by the Woolff Gallery since 2007. Her architectural training reappears through repetitive sequences and structures, where tiny individual hand-rolled cones are repeated for many metres, resembling coral reefs, sea anemones, tiny poppy flowers, leaves, petals, or pods.
So thin as to resemble paper, their jagged edges and cool whiteness give the impression of hardness at first, but the creamy off-white and shadows cast inside the ceramic hollows instead give off a soft, comforting warmth – an effect put to good use for her wall commission for the cancer clinic at Barts Hospital.
Nascimento lives and works in southwest London.