Water as Memory and Movement: Andrea Vargas at Transitions
Andrea Vargas, ‘Countries Of The Sea’ 2025, Ceramic and Gold leaf,50 cm x 50 cm, $1600
Romulus Folio Gallery, South Melbourne
Chilean-born, Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist Andrea Vargas presents works from her Water series in Transitions at Romulus Folio Gallery. Her practice, which spans sculpture, photography, and ceramics, is grounded in material sensitivity, memory, and elemental rhythm.
This body of work is inspired by the poem Agua by Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, whose writing evokes water as a carrier of longing, return, and embodied memory. Vargas translates the poem’s emotional and elemental language into material form, allowing water to guide both process and outcome.
“llévenme a un blando país de aguas.”
“Take me to a gentle land of waters.”
The works move with a sense of flow and quiet continuity. Colour settles into the surface through repetition and patience. Forms curve and soften, holding the sensation of water rather than depicting it directly. Each piece carries a rhythm that mirrors the movement of water itself, shaped by time, gravity, and attentive making.
Water as Carrier of Memory
For Vargas, water functions as a connective force between body, place, and lineage. Drawing on personal and cultural memory, the Water series reflects how water gathers experience and carries it forward. The works hold tenderness and strength simultaneously, shaped through presence and care.
“ Rompa mi vaso y al beberla me vuelva niñas las entrañas!”
“Shatter my glass and let drinking turn my insides young again.”
This sense of renewal and return enters the work through surface and gesture. Marks accumulate gently. Glazes pool and shift. The pieces feel lived with, shaped through the persistence and patience of sustained engagement. Water becomes both subject and method, guiding transformation through repetition and attention.
Andrea Vargas Within Transitions
Photograph by Scott Ross
Curated by Angelina Mirabito, Transitions brings together artists exploring movement, change, and becoming. Vargas’s Water series situates transition within elemental rhythm. Transformation unfolds gradually, through accumulation and flow, echoing the way water shapes form over time.
Within the exhibition, her works offer moments of grounding and intimacy. They invite viewers into a sensory encounter with material, memory, and presence, reminding us that transition is experienced through the body and carried through matter.
Viewing the Work
Andrea Vargas’s Water series is on view as part of Transitions at Romulus Folio Gallery, The Gladstone, South Melbourne, until 25 January.
Original works are available for acquisition.
Romulus Folio Gallery 55 Gladstone Street,
South Melbourne, 3205, Victoria, Australia
Wednesday - Friday 12 - 7pm
Saturday & Sunday 12pm - 5pm
By appointment
Written by Angelina Mirabito PhD