Bárbara Penaforte is an artist, surface designer, and ceramicist. Her background in Fashion Design, complemented by postgraduate studies in Fashion and Creation and in Illustration and Digital Animation, provides a solid foundation for her practice, which has been primarily developed through artistic work and visual research.
Her work focuses on the exploration of clay as a living material, investigating its structure, elasticity, and behavior. She is interested in understanding how the material responds to action, pressure, manipulation, and transformation, and how these responses can generate new formal and sensory possibilities. Within this process, texture and color play a fundamental role in the construction of her artistic language.
Her interest in ceramics emerged from her work in textile printing, where she explored surfaces, rhythms, and patterns. Over time, this research expanded into the three- dimensional realm, bringing her closer to the material and the gesture, and allowing her to engage with the transformation of form through making. Ceramics has thus become the central axis of her artistic practice, a field where process, material, and experimentation intersect. Her approach is grounded in the continuous exploration of formal and technical solutions, combining drawing, color, and material in unique pieces that reflect a sensitive and material-driven research.