Having trained in costume design in Florence, and later spent seven years in London’s fashion industry, Patricia Perales García (b. 1991, Burgos) came to clay with a maker’s understanding of how materials meet the body.

Her childhood landscape in Burgos gives the work a lateral pull. In conversation with Laura Bartlett for AMO, Perales García connects that line to the openness beyond the town, a place where thought could move past the city’s edge. Copenhagen sharpened her attention to volume through buildings and rooms; on Glænø, where she also works, the day is more exposed to weather and family life, so the studio absorbs interruption as part of the work.

Perales García has spoken of mixing chalk with pigment before painting the sculptures, leaving terracotta with a powder-dry surface. In the textile works, pieces of cloth are dyed, painted or left bare, then joined in strips that feel nearer to garment-making than conventional image-making. A vessel may take on the tactility of clothing; there is no reason a hanging panel can’t retain the intimacy of cloth cut from a garment.

This attention to material has extended into drawing and painting. Perales García has been sketching on paper alongside her sculptural and textile work, and with aarticles she presents Motherhood, a new series of oil paintings on wood exploring the emotional terrain of early parenthood. Painted on discarded panels, the works carry the same instinct for material and imperfection that runs through her practice — the wood's irregularities left visible rather than smoothed away.