Trinidad Contreras
Jeweller
Published: 23.04.2026
trinidadcontreras.comBio
Trinidad Contreras, born in 1977 in Seville, Spain, graduated in Artistic Jewelry from the Massana School in Barcelona (2007-2010), under the tutelage of Ramón Puig. She recently created the FAD Cup, a unique piece designed to celebrate the toast at the members' annual assembly. A finalist for the 2022 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, she is one of the artisans recommended by the Michelangelo Foundation's Homo Faber Guide. In 2023, she received the Designers and Creatives Award from JORGC in Barcelona. Early in her career, she won the Marzee International Graduate Prize in the Netherlands. She also received an honorable mention at the Cheongju International Craft Biennial in South Korea and second prize at ArtsFAD in Barcelona in 2017. Her pieces are part of permanent collections, including those of the Fondazione Cominelli (Italy), the Marzee Gallery (Netherlands), and the Legnica Art Gallery (Poland).Statement
As a creator in the field of contemporary artistic jewelry, I strive to remain constantly evolving, experimenting and challenging myself to avoid repetition without losing my essence. My goal is to offer pieces that convey sensitivity, balance, and a personal voice.From her formative years, porcelain became her primary medium of expression, forging a path where ceramics takes center stage. In her work, the boundaries between sculpture, craft, and jewelry blur, allowing the pieces to inhabit diverse creative spaces. Her work stems from a balance between technical curiosity and a uniquely natural aesthetic. By choosing porcelain, her process transforms into a constant dialogue with the material, challenging its fragility to explore themes that resonate with us all. Through forms, textures, and color, she reflects on memory, the passage of time, and the value of the present, among other subjects. It is a visual language that seeks simplicity and lightness, transforming matter into something imbued with poetry.
Solid Waves series, 2026
Solid Waves is a meeting point between the forms of the living and the vestiges of time. Through this series, I explore how emptiness and what is no longer there can acquire a physical and tangible quality, transforming the memory of an object into its very substance. The focus is not on the represented object, but on the imprint or trace it leaves behind. I use ceramics as a seismograph of the ephemeral, capturing the energy of a wave or the imprint of a human footprint to transform them into "fossils" of an imagined civilization. My challenge is the fixity of the ephemeral: to grant permanence to what, by nature, is transient.
The work evokes nature without literally copying it. Through water abstraction, I translate the movement of the sea into porcelain textures that defy the rigidity of the material. On this "organic chaos," I intervene with a subtle geometry of gold dots that act as cartographies of human order, creating a formal tension between the wild and the structured.
Midway through, I found a similarity in the action of Lithoredos, mollusks that bore into stone. I present pieces that appear to have been inhabited. Sculptures that, when opened, reveal, for example, the void of a necklace, an abandoned space, transforming the rupture into the birth of a new interior space. I don't represent the object itself, but rather the memory of its passage through matter.
During the process, I revisit the shape of the earring clasp, transforming it into an ornamental scroll, elevating its original function to that of an architectural component that provides support. These forms are integrated into pedestals that become part of the piece itself, unified to create an ascending structure.
The process occurs in two stages of constructive hybridization: Thermal Alchemy: The search for union through vitreous fusion in the kiln.
Post-Alchemical Intervention: A functional and aesthetic decision where I use cement and polyurethane adhesives to complete the structure, contributing an industrial brutality that reveals an assembly of forces; human will intervenes where the fire stops. Solid Waves is, ultimately, a visual refuge; a space where the viewer can observe the "inhabited void" and recognize their own memory within it.
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