Artist Statement

My work intuitively emerges out of noise, guided by a desire to honor the memories and relationships that have shaped me. I grew up inspired by my mother’s quiet creativity, expressed through writing, sewing, and the transformation of everyday materials into objects of purpose. My connection to ceramics emerged from my curiosity about my maternal grandfather, a porcelain painter whom I know only through the stories my mother shared with me. These inherited forms of art making taught me to recognize the possibilities held within everyday objects and shaped my understanding of art as a language of memory and connection.

As someone who also lives through writing, I see ceramic art as a language that exists beyond words, giving a physical form to memories and emotions, and my writing has gradually become inseparable from my current sculptures. Working with stoneware, porcelain, engobes and glazes, I shape each piece by hand, creating sculptural objects that preserve the vestiges of touch and transformation. I approach the ceramic surface as a skin where memory can be inscribed through color, scratches, raw textures, irregular forms, and my own words.

Grief has become a central source of inspiration in my work. Cicatrizes (Scars) lies at the heart of my practice and is a collection that explores the transfiguration of marks through the form of the vessel, revealing the quiet beauty of a body in the process of healing. The collection inhabits the duality between fragility and strength.

I see these pieces as companions. Like scars, they hold stories within their surfaces and invite proximity, touch and time.

Bio

Fernanda Toledo is a ceramic artist and writer from São Paulo, Brazil, currently based in Seattle, Washington. A self-taught artist, she began working with clay in 2020 and found in ceramics another form of artistic expression.

Fernanda’s work draws on grief as a central source of inspiration, reflecting her emotional and physical experiences while exploring the forms loss takes in the body and mind. In 2025, she began developing her first ceramic collection, Cicatrizes: A Transfiguration of Marks.

Fernanda was selected to participate in three group exhibitions at Purple Maroon in San Francisco between 2025 and 2026. She continues to develop her ceramic practice in Seattle.

Alongside her ceramic practice, Fernanda holds a degree in Communications and a specialization in Creative Writing. In 2018, her short story “Frio” was published in A Última Canção, an anthology released in Brazil.

Group Exhibitions:

2026 - Fernanda Toledo – PURPLEMAROOM Store, San Francisco, CA

2025 - Cicatrizes I & II Collection, PURPLEMAROOM Store, San Francisco, CA