underwater weaving

Much like the ocean, vanessa barragão’s art has a lot going on beneath the surface.

It can take a moment to realise what you're looking at when you first see textile designer Vanessa Barragão's Ocean Tapestry. An undulating mass of dreamy marine pastels, arterial lines and corallike mounds, you have to consciously remind yourself what you're seeing isn't actually organic – it's just weaving taken to its extreme.

Using a combination of latch-hooking, hand-tufting, crochet, basketry, felt-work and macramé, Vanessa – a resident of the Portuguese town of Porto – creates art that speaks to our uneasy relationship with the world's seas and oceans. "Ocean Tapestry represents our planet's vast saltwater areas and the importance of circularity in every natural environment," Vanessa says. "The ocean is a place full of inspiration; it's literally the origin of life on Earth, yet we're doing our best to destroy it."

Vanessa grew up in Albufeira, a coastal city in Portugal's south, where the rhythms of the ocean thrummed through every aspect of daily life. Learning to crochet at her grandmother’s feet, she soon discovered a knack for the more complicated and technical aspects of threadwork. However, it was while studying fashion and textile design at Lisbon University that Vanessa came face-to-face with the terrible costs of the art form she loved. "The textile industry is one of the most polluting in the world," she explains. "The machinery uses tonnes of energy, while also producing a lot of harmful chemical waste." The ocean absorbs 90 per cent of all our atmospheric pollution, she says, while global warming is blanching and erasing our coral reefs. "Without these immense habitats, a major part of all sea life will become extinct, and the consequences will be catastrophic."

Vanessa has designed her practice as a counterpoint to the excesses of mass-produced textiles. Porto is the epicentre of Portugal's textile industry, and all the materials Vanessa uses come from the deadstock of artisanal rug factories in nearby Beiriz. "I clean and recycle the yarns, then use handmade techniques to ensure my production is as eco-friendly as possible," she says. The process – which takes weeks to months to complete – is all about "using conscious production methods in an attempt to fight this negative mindset and improve our Earth's health".

For Vanessa, the creative process is an extension of the ocean's own "magic flow". "Life in the deep sea is so slow and simple, yet also vastly complex," she says. "I try to evoke that sensibility in my own practice." Like the ocean itself, her tapestries evolve and shift over the course of countless hours; different textures and forms emerging in response to her own impulses and the materials at hand. Music is one of Vanessa's primary tools for slipping into a crochet-flow state – her current soundtrack is a collaborative playlist she's created called ‘Aquatic Rhythms: Coral Echoes’, where people can "add any song they enjoy within a waterish genre".

The rugs and tapestries that emerge on the other side are both luminous and affecting; plush marine worlds that draw you in, demanding to be touched and explored, even as they seem to pay witness to their own fragility. "Ocean preservation is the main goal of all my work," Vanessa says. "When people see my tapestries, I hope they're inspired to create and live morally on a daily basis. Only then can we save our planet."