Overview
Paula Valdeón Lemus
"To reshape memory and ornament, letting patterns dissolve into organic forms that echo the spaces we inhabit."

Paula Valdeón Lemus’ work explores themes of everyday life and inhabitation, focusing on architectural bodies and objects that shape relationships, experiences, and behaviors. Her practice is deeply influenced by instability and the precarious nature of space—both its inaccessibility and its impermanence—questioning how privacy and memory are constructed within these shifting environments. The traces left in previously inhabited spaces become the foundation of her artistic language, serving as material for a broader reflection on place and belonging.

Motivated by an interest in how we manage decoration within domestic and architectural spaces, her work engages with urban material culture as a means of exploring memory and the aesthetics of daily life. Through painting and ceramics, she reformulates decorative and artistic patterns found in the streets, using them as raw material to manipulate, deconstruct, and return to an organic state. Her process is highly tactile, involving her own hands as both tool and gesture, transforming clay and oil into elements that provoke new questions. Her work ultimately reflects on the fiction of nature in ornamentation and how we internalize these visual narratives in the spaces we inhabit.

Works
Biography
Paula Valdeón Lemus

Paula Valdeón Lemus (Badajoz, 1992) is a visual artist whose work explores the intersection between memory, materiality, and ornamentation. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Salamanca and a Master’s Degree in Research in Art and Creation from the Complutense University of Madrid, where she currently lives and works.

 

Her practice began as an exercise in longing and a search for belonging, which gradually evolved into a deep interest in the materiality of places and their histories. Through painting and ceramics, she examines how decoration functions within domestic and urban spaces, using artistic and industrial patterns as tools to question the relationship between ornament and nature. By reformulating decorative motifs found in everyday surroundings, she transforms them into organic forms, incorporating her own hands as both a gesture and a tool.

 

Her work is driven by a sensitivity to how material culture reflects memory and human experience. Tiles, archaeological fragments, and industrialized designs become the basis for a broader reflection on the aesthetics of everyday life. By engaging directly with these materials, she creates entities that encapsulate both personal and collective narratives, inviting a more complex and nuanced reading of ornamentation and its role in shaping the spaces we inhabit.

Exhibitions
Press
Art Fairs