My practice sits between ceramics and the built environment, exploring how bodies and cities carry stress - how cracks appear, how repairs are made, and what those repairs reveal.
Working with clay, I approach repair as a language rather than a solution: seams, patches, and layered surfaces become records of time, use, and care.
Drawing on my background in architecture, I translate systems and public space into intimate ceramic and spatial works. I am particularly interested in fragments, thresholds, and overlooked junctions - where materials meet, shift, and wear.
The tactile quality of the work is essential. It asks for a slower, closer reading, where surface becomes a way of understanding pressure, memory, and change.
Across vessels, fragments, and site-responsive interventions, the work explores how we live with damage, how we make things habitable again, and how repair can operate as a shared public act.
Elena Larriba Andaluz is a Spanish-born artist and designer based in Naarm/Melbourne. Trained in architecture and industrial design, she spent over a decade shaping large-scale public projects before turning her focus to the intimacy of hand-crafted work.
Her practice explores touch, repair, and transformation, drawing on Spanish craft traditions, architectural forms, and the layered textures of the everyday. Through sculptural ceramics, site-specific installations, and works on paper, Elena invites audiences to slow down, notice details, and connect through the senses.
Her projects have been exhibited in Melbourne, including Gathered Fragments at Bargoonga Nganjin, North Fitzroy Library (City of Yarra, 2026), and she is currently developing Crackscape, a series of site-responsive ceramic interventions for the public realm.
