Born in Madrid, Virginia Payo Azabal is a textile artist and graphic designer who lives between Madrid and Vejer de la Frontera (Cádiz). Her practice occupies a deliberately open territory, where the low-warp loom coexists with material research and an increasingly direct relationship with architectural space.
Her career has advanced through an accumulation of languages. She trained in window display at the Istituto Europeo di Design and completed that education with studies in graphic design, interior design and set design. That way of seeing, shaped by composition, colour, structure and typography, runs through all of her artistic work today. In parallel, she has built a long career in branding and communication. Her work in set design and furniture design led her to take part in projects such as Casa Pasarela, Casa Decor and the Salone del Mobile in Milan.
The turn towards textiles grew out of a physical need to return to her hands after many years in front of a screen. Several journeys and encounters, among them her time at Xtant in Mallorca, brought her closer to materials and techniques that were new to her. She learned to weave at schools in Madrid and Barcelona and then carried on self-taught, finding in the loom a time of almost meditative concentration and, at the same time, a field for play and inquiry.
Her work is built from natural fibres sourced from Japan, India and Spain, including hemp, ramie, nettle, linen, jute, silk, banana fibre, pineapple thread, seaweed, plant barks, water hyacinth and mulberry paper. She works with them by observing their behaviour, their strength and their fragility, and understands the weft as any material capable of passing through the warp, whether previously worked paper, fabric or sheets of bark. Mineral pigments, cement, ceramics and aluminium have also found their way into her pieces, widening the possibilities of weaving and its relationship with other materials.
Virginia Payo conceives of her practice as a process of inquiry in which experimentation, error and the unexpected all play their part. Her current interests point towards a textile that leaves the flat plane to occupy space and enter into dialogue with architecture, and towards processes shared with other makers, in which an idea passes through other hands and returns transformed.