Com Fusion (with fusion) is the beginnings of a ceramics collaboration between two artists: Mariana Sampaio from Portugal, & Nicole Curcio from the United States. It began as an exchange and fusion of ideas, techniques, cultures and traditions that became an ongoing trans-Atlantic collaboration of artwork.

Mariana and Nicole take turns visiting the others home country, each time creating a new collection of work together. First in August 2022 in the US, then in Feb-March 2023 in Portugal, and hopefully Mariana will be coming back to the US in September to create a fresh, batch of work with Nicole. If you’d like to learn more about how the two artists met, click here for the whole story.

The bigger idea is to grow Com Fusion into a community ceramics studio in Portugal. It will be a resource and safe place for an international community for ceramic artists to learn from each other, brainstorm projects, share feedback, collaborate and elevate ceramics as an artform. We’ll be posting about the progress and doing some fundraising to fuel these projects as we go, but below you can see some of the work we have created in our first two collaborations.