Vanessa Bravo is a mixed media artist who enjoys practicing in multiple materials and disciplines. Bravo is an avid movie fan whose eclectic tastes in music, TV, film and wider popular culture inform her work in sculpture, printmaking, drawing and fiber arts.
Working primarily in fabric and clay for her sculptures, Bravo keeps an ongoing list of sculpture ideas on her iPad to refer back to. For Bravo, “Ideas just pop into my head.” In the past Bravo has frequently utilized the internet and Pinterest as a visual research tool, but in the future she wants to draw deeper inspiration from her own life experiences and imagination.
Bravo often creates original monotype prints, t-shirts and bags. Citing a sense of freedom in printmaking, she shares, “I like how beauty is in the eye of the beholder in art. You can choose any colors you want, you can make anything you want.”
Working in ceramics, Bravo prefers sculptures to creating pinch pots. Making pots can feel limiting to Bravo, which was related to a college class assignment. For Bravo, working at NIAD is different to college-related work since “there’s not pressure to do it ‘perfectly’ at NIAD and there’s more time to work longer on something.” She enjoys the possibilities of working with clay and remarks, “When you’re working with clay you can shape it any way that you want.”
In the future Bravo aims to be more inventive in her practice, with the goal to make work with more personal content and to develop her own unique visual language further.
