Art
Paula Bosco
Paula Bosco is an Argentine textile artist creating with an environmental consciousness. For us, her work transmits a kind of knowledge and feminine energy. In our conversation, she shared her shift from a career in fashion to a career as an artist, but more than that, an introspective process to find and connect with her authentic essence, something that she also transmits and shares through her artworks.
Can you tell us a bit about your background and what led you to start this project?
I'm from Córdoba. I studied at university in Rosario, a degree that I never practiced and never really connected with. At that time, I had always liked fashion, so I started to get more involved in it. So in parallel I started with fashion, and that's when I began working as a designer for my own brand. This inspiration comes from my family, I grew up surrounded by fabrics, patterns, embroidery. My grandmother is a seamstress, she and her sisters made clothes for the whole family, and that stayed with me, even if I didn't realize it at the time. I had a clothing brand in Córdoba for five years. After that I worked for other brands as a designer and pattern maker, and I felt that it wasn't giving me satisfaction anymore.
What made you shift away from fashion?
I felt that I still wanted to work with textiles, but in a more manual way. Fashion is an industry that moves super fast, always living in the future, always thinking ahead, and that completely threw me off. I was also very young, and sustaining the whole structure of a brand, producing in quantities, it got a bit out of hand. I wasn't prepared, and I wasn't enjoying it. So I said, okay, this is not the moment. And that's when I decided to go to London to study textile design at Central Saint Martins. It was a dream. It was an intensive, not a full degree, but a specialization focused on textile design and screen printing. That was in 2017, and that's where everything started to shift, where I began redefining where my creative search was going.
What changed for you during that time?
I finished the course and started doing internships in screen printing studios, unpaid, just helping. During that time, both in the course and in the studios, I started noticing how many chemicals were used in production. I would wash the screens and see all the paint going down the drain, hardening there, and I thought this is crazy. Even just being told you have to wear a mask and gloves made it feel unhealthy. So I started wondering if there was a way to do the same thing but in a more sustainable, more responsible way. That's when I entered the world of natural dyes. At the same time I was going through a personal and spiritual process. I felt a need to communicate what I was feeling to the world, my way of seeing things, of questioning why things are the way they are, of connecting with something ancestral. I don't know where it came from, but it felt like a calling. Maybe it sounds a bit mystical, but it was a need to transmit knowledge, like from indigenous communities. I don't know why I connect with that, but I do.
Photography credits: Paula Bosco.
Repose Archive is a creative direction journal documenting processes and projects across art, design, architecture, and hospitality.