Vanessa Donoso López
(O-O-O)

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, IE
24 July – 20 September 2026

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 and adaptation. She creates everyday forms such as bowls, cups and other vessels, as well as more primordial shapes which resemble stones or rocks. They act as ‘transitional objects’, a phrase which relates to a sense of understanding that precedes knowledge-based learning, resembling intuition and feeling. Donoso López makes detailed, skilfully engineered forms, or at times configuring large numbers of simplistic shapes into complex multi-part arrangements. She uses attainable materials like clay and soil, plants and water, to examine how traditions, language and values adapt across cultures over time. Donoso López enacts an authentic, pragmatic practice of care upon these materials. While they symbolise core elements of life and sustainability in nature, they require nurturing and attentiveness when brought into a cultural environment, and these are the conditions that Donoso López assigns herself through her art.

Her research on ‘transitional phenomena’ refers to the developmental space between internal and external reality, where creativity takes form, and identities and relationships are negotiated through objects, gestures, and shared practices. This type of inherent psychological experience begins to form in most people soon after birth – as a child begins to recognise a sensorial connection to specific objects, such as a toy or blanket, that offer comfort or familiarity previously associated solely with a parental figure. Referring to a different kind of transitional space, in architecture, Donoso López intentionally complicates the boundaries and hierarchies that can exist between studio and gallery environments, and the levels of resolution often expected from art objects on display. She does not differentiate between her tests and finished pieces, works made several years ago, and things produced in the weeks before the exhibition opening.

(O-O-O) is another open-ended prompt to consider understanding beyond written language, as a title that does not use words. The letterforms might suggest the sound ‘ooo’, or the shape a mouth makes when making this sound. The repeated graphic symbols signal a pattern or continuous process, a code to unlock a hidden meaning. In fact, (O-O-O) is shorthand for object oriented ontologies, a metaphysical theory that places all entities: humans, animals, plants, objects, and ideas, and the components that they are made from, as equal to one another, existing with their own agency and reality. OOO can also refer to ‘out of office’, a change in the pace or place of work. In this case, Donoso López has decamped much of her active studio on the third floor of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, to the ground floor Gallery. The mismatched furniture, studio lighting and artefacts of her daily life are interspersed with artworks and other refined objects. The resulting immersive installation includes hundreds of ceramic vessels, clay handhelds, glazing and firing samples, clay-dyed fabrics, tiles, drawings, beads, kinetic sculptures, water features, lamps, research materials, test pieces, and studio ephemera. By bringing together many material processes including low-fired ceramics, natural pigments, water and living plants, Donoso López creates a sensitive ecosystem in a state of ongoing change.

The microhabitats that make up the installation, the detailed moving sculptures and living plants speak to the permeability and precariousness of contemporary life. The various plants are individual markers in time that signify a place or series of memories for the artist. One particular plant is grown from a cutting taken during a residency in Spain several years ago, another a gift from a friend’s mother in Dublin, others gathered over years of moving between residency to residency, house to house, studio to studio. Donoso López does not make her work about a specific subject or attempt to illustrate a diasporic experience, instead she inhabits her work; it is a result of her state of being in the world. The same is true of the many samples of clay collected throughout Ireland and Spain that lie dormant within the exhibition. They hold the possibility of being reactivated with water to become supple and malleable again and to be formed into other useful or aesthetic objects. Similarly, other unfired clay pieces can be moulded back to unformed natural clay and returned to the earth. Through a methodology of accommodation and sensitivity, Donoso López hints at the potential for the transformation of objects and their physical composition, making visible the influence of external factors on material forms, echoing the ways people in transit adapt to and reshape their surroundings.

Donoso López’s work conveys that there is more than only human hands involved in the making of art. She asks us to consider the origin of the clay; what types of minerals and geological processes have been part of its formation over thousands of years, resulting in distinct colours and how they react and transform when fired. The natural mineral pigments and porous clays from different locations demonstrate the potential of movement as a strategy for adaptation, resistance and transformation. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a commissioned text by curator and teacher Caterina Almirall with translations in English, Catalan and Spanish, designed by Keith Tormey. An interview between Vanessa Donoso López and TBG+S Marketing + Communications Manager Sadbh O’Brien can also be accessed on the TBG+S website.

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); The ongoing clay project: Centre d’Art la Rectoria Barcelona, Can Serrat El Bruc Barcelona, Jiwar Barcelona, Nau Coclea Camallera Girona (2018-2019); Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2018); Candyland, Stockholm (2017); The LAB, Dublin (2016); Supermarket Stockholm, with Ormston House (2015); Limerick City Gallery (2015).

Vanessa Donoso López is a Three Year Studio Member at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. This exhibition is supported by an Arts Council Project Award.