Meet the Talents: Inés Pesado Catrufo
The Sigma Talent Artist Awards programme continues by spotlighting another of this year’s selected photographers, Inés Pesado Catrufo, a Dublin-based visual artist whose practice sits in the spaces between memory, imagination, and lived experience.
Inés has built a photographic language shaped by intimacy, care, and a deep engagement with the queer community. Her previous project, All Flowers Lost in Time, explored themes of time, trace, and the inevitability of change. These images blended documentation and invention, capturing the texture of everyday moments that seem to vanish as soon as they are felt.
A NEW CHAPTER
Through the Sigma scholarship, Inés will expand her research into liminality — first developed in All Flowers Lost in Time — bringing this inquiry into sharper focus through the lens of queerness. In her project proposal, Inés writes of photography’s “impossibility… to capture reality fully,” describing the image instead as “an artefact suspended between the real and the (re)imagined.” She will explore how queer life often unfolds in in-between states: between visibility and erasure, conformity and authenticity. She intends to disrupt conventional power dynamics by involving her subjects directly in the staging and formation of scenes.
The image as “an artefact suspended between the real and the (re)imagined.”
All Flowers Lost in Time © Inés Pesado Catrufo
“Photography cannot be queer unless it is practised queerly.”
For Inés, the project is inseparable from the political moment. Her intention is to develop a visual methodology that embraces the fluidity inherent in queer life—an approach that mirrors the communities she photographs and collaborates with. At a time when queer identities are increasingly misrepresented or exploited, she aims to position photography as a tool of refusal and reclamation: a space where meaning is not prescribed but co-authored.
As she begins the scholarship, Inés is eager to lean into experimentation — to build scenes, gestures, and images that unfold collaboratively. She is motivated by the possibility of reshaping photographic truth, pushing the medium to accommodate contradiction, complexity, and multiplicity. Her expectations for the programme are grounded in growth: the chance to deepen her conceptual investigations, expand her technical and collaborative practices, and ultimately create a body of work that reflects both personal evolution and collective experience.
Inés enters this year’s programme with a clear vision and an open-ended approach to image-making. We look forward to witnessing the worlds she constructs: spaces where memory and imagination entwine, where queerness is lived and felt, and where photography becomes not just a way of seeing, but a way of reimagining what might be possible.
All Flowers Lost in Time © Inés Pesado Catrufo
