Gabriela Simionato: Giving Memory a Body
Gabriela Simionato is a Brazilian ceramic artist based in Salvador, Bahia, whose practice investigates the profound relationship between material, memory, and social reality. Born in Campinas, she draws upon the cultural richness of Bahia while addressing urgent contemporary issues, including gender inequality, economic disparity, and the vulnerability of marginalized communities.
Working primarily with clay, Simionato embraces ceramics as both a physical medium and a symbolic language. For her, clay is a living material that preserves traces of history, resilience, and transformation. Through hand-built forms and expressive surfaces, she creates works that merge personal narratives with collective experiences, revealing stories often overlooked or silenced.
Her sculptures are deeply connected to everyday life in Salvador, reflecting the city's vibrant cultural identity while confronting complex social realities. By balancing craftsmanship with conceptual inquiry, Simionato invites viewers to engage emotionally and critically with themes of justice, humanity, and belonging.
For Gabriela Simionato, memory is not something that simply belongs to the past. It lives in objects, gestures, stories, sounds, and fragments of everyday life—sometimes quietly, sometimes with enough force to return an entire moment to the present.
Her ceramic practice begins from this desire to preserve: to give physical form to experiences that might otherwise remain invisible. Through clay, memories acquire weight, volume, and permanence, while also undergoing a transformation of their own. What begins as something deeply personal gradually opens into questions of family, identity, womanhood, affection, violence, and belonging.
The Stories Objects Carry
Simionato has always felt a strong emotional connection to objects. Their importance, for her, is rarely determined by their material value. Instead, an ordinary object can become meaningful because of the story attached to it—the person who gave it, the place where it was received, or the moment in life that it quietly witnessed.
An object can preserve what is difficult to hold onto. It can carry affection and longing, absence and fear, or remain as a reminder of someone or something that has changed.
This understanding became central to Simionato’s relationship with ceramics. Clay offers her a way to translate memory into matter: to take something fragile and intangible and give it a physical presence. Yet her practice has gradually moved beyond preserving personal memories alone. The intimate can become collective.
A story about family may begin as her own, but it can also speak to childhood, relationships, inequality, violence, or the experience of being a woman. In this way, the personal becomes a point of departure rather than a boundary.
Between What We Keep and What Remains
Memory runs through Simionato’s work not as a fixed archive, but as something continually carried into the present.
She is drawn to the stories of everyday life, particularly those connected to family, childhood, relationships, and the realities of life in Brazil. Some are tender; others are uncomfortable. Together, they form the complicated emotional landscape of lived experience.
Her work occupies the space between these opposing impulses: the desire to preserve what we love and the difficulty of confronting what we might rather forget.
Rather than treating the past as something finished, Simionato asks what happens when it continues to shape the present. What do we choose to carry? What do we transform? And what remains with us despite the passage of time?
These questions give her objects an emotional presence that extends beyond their physical form.
When Music Opens the Door
Interestingly, Simionato’s creative process often begins before clay ever enters the studio.
Music can act as a trigger, transporting her back to a particular moment with surprising immediacy. A song may recall a place, a person, a smell, or a detail that seemed forgotten. From that return comes the impulse to tell a story.
Writing and drawing follow. She records fragments, thoughts, images, and observations, often keeping a notebook close so that an idea can be captured whenever it appears. Some of these beginnings remain on paper for months or even years before becoming physical works.
This slow accumulation is an important part of her practice. A ceramic piece may have existed internally long before it takes shape in material.
When Memory Meets Clay
Once Simionato begins working with clay, another kind of dialogue begins.
She may enter the process with a clear idea of what she wants to create and the feeling she hopes to communicate, but ceramics introduces a degree of unpredictability that cannot be completely controlled.
Clay responds. It resists, gives way, deforms, breaks, and changes through firing. Drying, glazing, and firing each introduce their own conditions, making the final object a collaboration between intention and material.
For Simionato, this unpredictability is not an obstacle. It is part of what makes the medium meaningful.
The memory she begins with does not simply become an object. It changes along the way, just as memories themselves change as they are revisited, retold, and understood from different points in life.
The Beauty of the Unplanned
Experimentation, therefore, is not simply a technical exercise in Simionato’s practice. It is a willingness to remain open to discovery.
She describes a constant negotiation between what she intends and what the material allows. Instead of forcing clay to reproduce an image that already exists in her mind, she observes its responses and adjusts accordingly.
Sometimes what initially appears to be a mistake reveals an unexpected possibility. A break, deformation, or material shift can lead somewhere that a carefully controlled process never would have reached.
This requires patience. Ceramics cannot always be rushed, and its stages cannot be entirely predicted. The material has its own rhythm.
Giving Form to What Cannot Be Held
At the heart of Gabriela Simionato’s practice is a quiet paradox: she begins by trying to preserve something, yet the act of making inevitably transforms it.
A memory enters the process as an experience, a story, a feeling, or an image. Through writing, drawing, clay, and fire, it becomes something else—something physical that can exist beyond the artist herself.
That transformation allows the personal to become shared.
Her ceramics remind us that objects are rarely only objects. They can become witnesses, containers, reminders, and carriers of stories. They can hold traces of people and places long after circumstances have changed.
And perhaps this is where Simionato’s work finds its deepest resonance: in the space between remembering and transforming, between what we choose to preserve and what inevitably changes when we give it a body.
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