María Bernardeau

María Bernardeau is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans the fields of sculpture and the performing arts. Trained in Fine Art and with a professional career as an actress, her work moves between the visual and the performative, exploring the expressive possibilities of the body and of materials.

Her artistic research centres on the body understood as a space of memory: a territory in which experiences, emotions and memories are inscribed. From this perspective, Bernardeau addresses the physical dimension of memory and the way in which lived experience endures and manifests itself through the body.

Her work is characterised by a particular sensitivity towards bodily experience and a keen focus on the female experience. Through her practice, the artist explores those intimate and universal aspects that permeate women’s bodies, paying particular attention to the physical and emotional traces left by lived experiences.

In her sculptural practice, she works primarily with fired porcelain and iron, materials she uses for their physical and symbolic qualities. Through these materials, her sculptures seek to translate and make visible bodily sensations, tensions, imprints and physical states which, although intangible, form part of the human experience.

The relationship between body, matter and memory thus forms the core of a body of work situated in a space between sculpture and performance, where the material ceases to be merely a medium and becomes a vehicle for experience, perception and memory.