THE ARTIST
María Laura Barbato is a self-taught contemporary mixed-media artist whose work centers on bead mosaics created through the deliberate placement of thousands of individual beads. Her dimensional surfaces transform with light and movement, allowing texture, reflection, and relief to become integral elements of the composition.
Originally from Uruguay and now based in North Carolina, María Laura draws inspiration from nature, symbolic imagery, and personal experience. Through years of experimentation, she has developed a distinctive visual language in which precision, intuition, and materiality come together to create works that shift between image, surface, and sculptural relief.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores the relationship between light, texture, and transformation through contemporary bead mosaics.
Working bead by bead, I create dimensional surfaces in which relief, repetition, and reflected light become active elements of the composition. Each bead is deliberately placed for its color, shape, finish, and orientation, allowing the work to shift subtly as light changes and the viewer moves around it.
Nature, movement, and personal transformation recur throughout my work. Organic forms and symbolic imagery often become starting points for ideas rooted in personal experience, gradually taking shape through thousands of individual decisions.
I am drawn to the tension between precision and intuition, stillness and movement, structure and transformation. Rather than remaining visually fixed, each work responds to its surroundings: reflections change, details emerge and recede, and the surface reveals itself differently from one position to another.
Through this interaction, I create works that invite close observation and unfold gradually through light, movement, and time.
