Paula Ortega is an Anglo-Argentinean artist concerned with what is precious and how we assign meaning and value to objects. A trained opera singer, she also studied music composition and audio-visual communication before training in jewellery making in London.

Selected by the Crafts Council UK to take part of their Hothouse programme in 2014, she is relentlessly curious, precise and passionate about materials and processes. She is inspired by her fascination for fractals and the unseen structures and patterns in our world.

Paula is part of a materials revolution, where artists and makers are not only making objects, but also creating sustainable materials with which those objects are made. Driven by a desire to raise awareness of what constitutes the objects we use and admire, their origin and the trace that they eventually leave, whilst challenging our perception of their value, Paula has been developing her unique material for the last two years and her Footprints series of wearable and non-wearable sculptures explore the ideas behind the lifespan of a piece.