Julia Vergara Ballester

ARTIST’S PROFILE

Julia Vergara Ballester is a visual artist based in Madrid. She works across a range of materials and media, including textiles, wood, paper, ceramics, and glass. Her practice champions craftsmanship and the applied arts, exploring the expressive possibilities of these materials and techniques.

Her visual world draws on the avant-garde, Surrealism, and Arte Povera, alongside references to fashion, everyday objects, and childhood. Through these influences, she explores play, memory, and humour.

In 2007, she founded SuTurno, a label centred around printed patterns and their application to different formats, including silk scarves, clothing, and other decorative objects.

In 2012, she presented Inutiles, a project inspired by the playful experimentation of the avant-garde. The project explores geometry through play, modules, patterns, repetition, and colour, working across paper, silk, wood, stamps, and clay tiles.

Between 2014 and 2019, she developed Wood meets Wind, a project in which she transformed pieces of wood found at sea, remnants of boats and fishing vessels collected with her father, into small boats. As in a collage, each fragment finds its place and becomes a sail, mast, wave, or hull.

In 2025, she presented La Piel que Dura, an exhibition exploring the ephemeral marks that clothing leaves on our skin, a memory that fades within minutes.

Ceramics become a canvas, or perhaps a skin, onto which the marks and textures of intimate garments are imprinted and transferred. 

Gloves become hands, socks become feet… These animated elements, glazed in delicate pastel colours, connect us with a sense of joy and vitality when brought together.

The exhibition invites us to look at ceramics from a different perspective, highlighting their texture, colour, and adaptability, to the point where they can almost be mistaken for real fabric.

Read about Julia‘s residency project in her own words… 

During my time at La Moissie, I want to continue exploring the ideas behind my most recent exhibition, La Piel que Dura, a project based on the transfer of textures onto ceramics. I want to further explore the adaptability of this material, while also incorporating patterns and decorative techniques.