Subheadline:
At Lévy Gorvy Dayan in New York, Inma Barrero transforms hundreds of handmade ceramic beads into monumental maternal forms, weaving together sound, earth, memory, and traditions of repair.
Discover Hook
What if a sculpture could be heard as well as seen—and what if the visible evidence of repair became part of its strength?
Those questions sit at the center of Inma Barrero’s MOTHERS, a solo exhibition at Lévy Gorvy Dayan in New York’s Upper East Side. On view September 17 through October 17, 2026, the exhibition brings together eight large-scale ceramic bead sculptures that form what Barrero describes as a “chorus” of maternal figures, with additional works presented in a satellite space on the gallery’s third floor.
The exhibition brings together several strands of Barrero’s practice—ceramics, sculpture, installation, sound, mythology, motherhood, and material repair—without separating them into distinct categories.
Instead, they become interconnected through one deceptively simple element: the bead.
From the Smallest Unit to Monumental Form
Barrero builds her sculptures from hundreds of individually handmade ceramic beads.
The small units are assembled into large anthropomorphic structures that can suggest standing, reclining, carrying, enclosing, or spilling bodies. The resulting sculptures occupy a curious space between figurative representation and abstraction.
The individual bead remains visible, but its identity changes once it becomes part of a larger body.
For MOTHERS, Barrero combines porcelain, earthenware, and terracotta with soils sourced from Japan, Mexico, and Spain. The mixture of different earths becomes conceptually important: the material itself carries multiple geographic histories before it is transformed into sculpture.
The works are therefore constructed through accumulation.
One bead does not constitute the sculpture. Hundreds of them do.
That relationship between the individual and the collective becomes particularly resonant in a series centered on maternal figures.
A Chorus of Mothers
The sculptures draw on maternal and divine figures from different cultures and historical periods.
Among the works are Hariti, Nutrix, Pachamama, Tellus, and Ataecina, each approaching the idea of the mother through a different historical or mythological reference. Pachamama, for example, connects its triangular form to imagery of the Virgin Mary, while Ataecina rises from the floor with the appearance of an archaeological form emerging from the earth.
Barrero does not begin these anthropomorphic abstractions from conventional sketches. According to the exhibition material, the forms develop first, with titles and references emerging through the process.
That distinction matters.
The sculptures are not simply illustrations of pre-existing myths. Their physical forms lead the investigation, while mythology provides another layer through which viewers can encounter them.
The result is a group of figures that can feel ancient without belonging to one particular historical moment.
Repair as Structure
One of the most compelling aspects of Barrero’s practice is the way she uses repair not simply to fix ceramic objects but to construct them.
The beads are joined with metal wire in a process that Barrero connects to Spanish lañado, a traditional method of repairing broken ceramics with metal bindings, and Japanese kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired with lacquer and metallic powders.
The distinction is important.
In conventional ideas of ceramic perfection, a crack may represent damage that needs to disappear.
Barrero instead makes joining visible.
The wire becomes both a structural element and a visual line. What might ordinarily be understood as evidence of vulnerability becomes part of the sculpture’s anatomy.
This approach also has a personal dimension. Barrero has previously connected the act of stitching ceramic pieces to memories of women in her family sewing and making things with their hands. She describes the act of joining as being associated with home.
Repair, therefore, becomes more than technique.
It becomes memory.
The Sound of Ceramic
MOTHERS also extends beyond visual sculpture.
Inside the exhibition space, The Mothers’ Voice (2026), created by Barrero in collaboration with Yannick Paget and soprano Yumiko Tanimura, introduces an acoustic dimension to the installation.
The composition incorporates the sound of Barrero’s ceramic beads moving and touching one another, Tanimura’s voice, and a seascape.
This is where the idea of “acoustic ceramics” becomes particularly useful—not as a claim that ceramics have suddenly become musical instruments, but as a way of thinking about the physical life of the material.
Ceramic beads have weight.
They collide.
They shift.
They create friction and resonance.
Once hundreds of them are assembled into a sculpture, movement and contact become potential sources of sound.
The acoustic element therefore does not sit completely outside the sculpture. It emerges from the material relationship between its individual parts.
Earth, Motherhood, and the Body
Barrero’s interest in ceramics is closely connected to her broader thinking about motherhood and the natural world.
Born in Almendralejo, Spain, in 1969 and based in New York, Barrero began working more extensively with ceramics in the early 2000s, around the time she became a mother. Her practice has since developed around sculpture, installation, and sound, with recurring interests in womanhood, motherhood, community, making, and repair.
The use of earth in MOTHERS adds another dimension.
Soils from Spain, Mexico, and Japan are brought together within the ceramic material, connecting different landscapes through the physical substance of the sculpture. The result is not a literal map, but a material geography.
Motherhood becomes linked to earth.
Earth becomes linked to making.
Making becomes linked to repair.
And repair becomes linked to survival.
The Handmade Against the Monumental
There is also an important tension between scale and labor in MOTHERS.
From a distance, the sculptures can appear monumental. Up close, however, their construction is revealed through hundreds of small, handmade components.
The monumental is therefore produced through repetition.
This makes Barrero’s process almost the opposite of the single heroic gesture often associated with monumental sculpture. Her forms accumulate through countless smaller acts of shaping, firing, glazing, threading, and joining.
That slow process is embedded in the finished objects.
The sculptures retain the visual language of individual beads even after those beads have become part of bodies several feet tall.
The viewer is encouraged to move between two scales: the scale of the individual handmade object and the scale of the collective figure.
Mythology Without a Single Mother
The exhibition’s references to different maternal figures also prevent MOTHERS from becoming a portrait of one universal idea of motherhood.
Hariti, Pachamama, Tellus, Ataecina, and other references emerge from different cultural and historical contexts.
Their coexistence suggests a broader investigation into how societies have imagined fertility, protection, nourishment, creation, and the earth itself.
At the same time, the exhibition does not require viewers to know every mythological reference to engage with the sculptures.
Their physical language comes first.
A reclining figure can be encountered as a body.
A rising form can be experienced as an archaeological presence.
A cluster of beads can suggest seeds, prayer beads, fragments, cells, or pieces of a larger organism.
The references deepen the experience without completely determining it.
A Material Philosophy of Vulnerability
Perhaps the strongest thread running through MOTHERS is vulnerability.
Ceramic is durable, but it is also breakable.
A bead can fracture.
A sculpture can require joining.
A handmade object carries evidence of the process that created it.
Barrero turns those characteristics into a visual philosophy in which fragility and strength are not opposites.
The exhibition’s emphasis on repair makes that especially clear. A joined object is not necessarily an object that has failed. The join can become the place where structure is created.
The same principle operates at the level of the sculptures themselves.
Individual beads are fragile.
Together, they become monumental.
New York, Earth, and the Contemporary Ceramic Field
The arrival of MOTHERS in New York also contributes to the city’s continuing interest in ceramics as a contemporary art medium rather than a category confined to craft.
Barrero’s practice sits comfortably across those boundaries.
Her work is handmade but formally ambitious. It draws from historical repair traditions while using contemporary installation and sound. It references ancient mythology while remaining materially experimental.
That hybridity is central to the exhibition’s appeal.
MOTHERS does not ask viewers to choose between craft and contemporary art, object and installation, sound and sculpture, or fragility and strength.
It makes those categories interact.
The Sculpture Continues Beyond the Object
By combining ceramic beads, metal stitching, earth, mythology, and sound, Inma Barrero gives MOTHERS a physical vocabulary that is unusually tactile.
The exhibition’s central figures are built from small units, but they communicate on a much larger scale.
They speak about motherhood without reducing it to a single image.
They speak about repair without hiding the break.
They speak about earth not simply as landscape, but as material.
And through The Mothers’ Voice, they literally make the ceramic body audible.
In Barrero’s hands, the bead becomes more than a decorative element.
It becomes a unit of memory.
The wire becomes more than a fastening.
It becomes a line of connection.
And the repaired ceramic becomes more than an object restored.
It becomes an image of how fragile things can acquire strength by being held together.
Inma Barrero: MOTHERS
Lévy Gorvy Dayan
19 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10065
September 17–October 17, 2026
Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
