So far, two distinct phases can be traced in the work of María Ossandón. In the first, she created miniature landscapes or scenes contained within different vessels. These miniatures, highly artificial yet still closely related to familiar ideas of nature (especially urban nature), evoke a framed, domesticated and carefully arranged environment that persists in different forms.

In the second, more recent and long-standing phase, she has been collecting and reconstructing ceramic tableware from different countries. Through ink drawing, María Ossandón reworks the miniature scenes or landscapes found on each broken fragment, linking universal memories with personal experiences and creating an almost archival representation of these images. To do this, she has visited various antique fairs, adopting the gaze of a collector of objects that speak of other times, of stories that seem to surface again or resist being discarded in societies where immediacy and the absence of duration lead to constant replacement by new objects equally doomed to be thrown away. These pieces once held value in the domestic sphere and now reflect imaginaries and idealisations of a past or a way of life that refuses to disappear entirely.

There is here an exercise in memory and resistance, in dialogue both with what dies and with what may have “another life” without diminishing the previous one. These broken plates are thus given another chance at life or at dreaming, fully embracing the fragility that underpins any dream, always on the verge of vanishing or shattering.