Portugal.

Isabel Sousa Carvalho has been working with ceramics for 25 years. Alongside clay, she nurtures a deep passion for textiles and paper as artistic mediums, exploring their potential to hold memory, gesture, and form. Her practice is guided by two enduring sources of inspiration: the patterns and forces of Nature, and the complexity of human emotions.

At the heart of her work lies a motivation to explore texture—both the tactile textures that emerge from clay, fabric, and paper, and the invisible textures of human feeling. By observing and living closely with the natural world, Isabel finds recurring structures and rhythms that echo within us: the fragility of petals, the persistence of stone, the ebb and flow of water, the cycles of growth and decay. These natural patterns become metaphors for emotional states, which she translates into material research and artistic expression.

Her curiosity about how human emotions can be given physical presence leads her to constant experimentation, layering techniques and materials to reflect the nuances of joy, fragility, resilience, and vulnerability. In this dialogue between Nature and the inner landscape, Isabel’s work seeks to embody the delicate balance between form and feeling, matter and memory.