Materially Speaking: Recent Episodes
Materially Speaking
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Steaven Richard evolved his craft as an apprentice to several artisan blacksmiths over many years and in many countries, before establishing his own atelier in Paris specialising in artistic metalwork
Soon demand for his work, from architects and designers, grew - and he needed more space. To accommodate this, he moved to a large warehouse in Valenton and expanded his team of blacksmiths and metalworkers who combine traditional skills, and new technology.
Atelier Steaven Richard has become famous for its artistic metalwork. Prestigious designs include a bespoke metal floor for the studio of Karl Lagerfeld, the elevator doors for the Hotel de Paris in Monaco, and a ‘Steaven Richard’ limited edition bottle for Remy Martin.
We started to interview him in front of his wall of gorgeous wall samples in a colourful array of textures, patinas and designs and then went through to the workshops.
And we also tour his huge hangar-like workshop, which is buzzing with activity and the thrum of machinery.
Enormous shelves hold sheets of carefully-labelled metals. There’s large-scale equipment, and workers hand-finishing on long benches. It’s artisans work on a grand-scale. We see some samples of his finished work.
Mike Axinn and I took the train 50 km south of Paris, through the suburbs, to the dense wooded area of Bois le Roi, next to the forest of Fontainebleau. As the train slowed into the station, a bright blue sky is visible above the dense forest of wintry trees, and we see the lanky figure of Steaven waiting on the platform to greet us.
steavenrichard.fr
instagram.com/ateliersteavenrichard
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Xavier Montoy grew up in a family of doctors and was always keen on biology. When he chose an artistic route he wanted to focus attention on endangered insects to highlight how we should honour and conserve them.
As part of our Paris series, Mike Axinn and I go to the 11th arrondissement of Paris to meet Xavier and see how he creates jewellery with the Sternocera beetle.
Sternocera aequisignata live in Southeast Asia, especially in northeast Thailand. Their life cycle is two years, of which the period when they live above ground and reproduce and then die, lasts only a few weeks. Once a year, in September and October, villagers harvest and sort the elytra (fore-wings), and then Xavier sources them for his work.
Xavier’s workshop is in the artisan complex at the Cité des Taillandiers, in rue des Taillandiers, where around twenty artists and artisans have workspaces thanks to an initiative of the mayor of the 11th who is working to support historic craft activities in the arrondissement.
In his shared, neat workspace we find a magical display-box of beetles and butterflies, a case of jewellery tools and some 3D printing equipment. On a high shelf are some sheets of the precious material he has created from beetles in bright iridescent colours.
xaviermontoy.com
instagram.com/xavier_montoy
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Judith’s workshop is in the 10th arrondissement, tucked away in a courtyard behind huge iron gates where tall white buildings house workshops, and motorbikes and cars are squeezed against the walls. There are lines of plants in terracotta pots and a small white dog.
Judith greets us in her office where a history of her instruments line one wall – some with painted gold detail and others with fine marquetry work in wood.
She makes instruments on commission for professional and amateur musicians, ranging from promising students through to well-established performers, from all over the world. She also creates instruments for Swiss and French music conservatories and does restoration work on old viols.
In her light and airy workshops, we find a large store of seasoned wood including many triangular shapes ready to form the instrument, and shelves holding a rich assortment of spirits, glues and waxes.
She speaks about how she sources the wood in the Jura and how you can tell the age of the wood in an old instrument, and judge the climate over the years, through the stripes you see in the wood.
There’s a half finished instrument in a vice on a workbench and Judith runs through the process of creating her instruments for us, each of which takes a couple of months to complete. All the tools of Judith’s craft line the walls, including a fine selection of blades.
Judith talks of the pleasure both of making the instruments, and of hearing them play in the hands of their final owner.
judithkraft.net
In 2018, Judith Kraft was named Maître d’Art by the French Minister of Culture.
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In this, the second of our Venice series, Mike Axinn and I met Austrian born shoemaker Gabriele Gmeiner who makes high quality made-to-measure shoes in her workshop at Campiello del Sol. She speaks of her craft, her journey from Austria and why she chose Venice.
As we turned into Gabriele’s courtyard we found her sitting at a large wooden desk by her shop window, wearing a work apron, and smiling. A shoe was jammed between her knees as she filed the base of it. In front of her were a wide selection of hammers, tapes, knives and glues.
Leather ribbons were stapled on the walls and dozens of wooden handled tools were slotted inside their curves. Above her head, suspended from the ceiling, was a forest of wooden shoe lasts.
Gabriele studied at Cordwainers College in London, and in Paris at the Centre Formation Technologique Grégoire for saddlery. She honed her skills over ten years working throughout Europe before she came to Italy and made her home in Venice.
Every July Gabriele directs the shoemaking workshop of the Salzburg Festival making shoes to measure for opera singers and actors to support their performances.
She talks us through the process of creating the perfect shoe: from measuring the client, crafting the shoe, to the final fitting. She keeps the original last and also repairs shoes, ensuring they have a long life, and that their beauty grows with wear.
Gabriele talks about sustainability and explains how she tries to source sustainable cowhides from the food industry.
gabrielegmeiner.com
instagram.com/gabrielegmeiner
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Piero Dri is the fourth and youngest remer in Venice, making oars and oarlocks - or in Italian ‘forcolai’. Since he learnt to row aged 4, rowing has been his passion.
I came to Venice with sound specialist Mike Axinn for a special Venice series of Materially Speaking, during the Homo Faber celebration of artisans, in April 2022. We met three young artisans who are now bringing a fresh energy to the community with a particular eye on repair, re-use and sustainability.
Venice is an extraordinary Island city with a rich history, magnificent art and great beauty. However there are no cars and a frail infrastructure. And of course there are the tourists. So we were keen to discover what these artisans bring to Venice and why they like to call it home.
Piero’s vibrant personality has earned him the name of the ‘mad forcolai maker’ and so his workshop is called ‘Il Forcolaio Matto.’ As we arrive, Piero is opening up his shop - hooking flower boxes onto his window cill, and leaning a red and white striped oar against the wall.
He tells us how it was growing up in Venice, and how he escaped to the lagoon when he needed some peace, and to be with nature. He tells us of his studies as an astronomer and how he then changed direction and became an artisan.
Piero’s workshops have painted and varnished oars suspended from the ceiling. He speaks about the different woods he uses and the boat community in Venice.
In one window is a display of decorative forcolai, which hold their own as art objects in a variety of gorgeous woods. He speaks of a competition where he created a forcolai to express the natural beauty of the lagoon (see green and yellow forcolai below).
ilforcolaiomatto.it
instagram.com/ilforcolaiomatto
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In the Spring of 2022, sound specialist Mike Axinn and I went to Venice during Homo Faber, an event created by the Michelangelo Foundation to celebrate master craftsmanship.
We wanted to discover more about the community of younger artisans in Venice - what brought them there, and why they liked it.
First we met Piero Dri, a remer who makes oars and oarlocks, or as the Italians call them, ‘forcolai’. Since he learnt to row aged 4, rowing has been his passion.
Release date: 16 November 2022
Then we chatted with Austrian-born shoemaker Gabriele Gmeiner who makes high quality shoes to measure in her workshop at Campiello del Sol. She speaks of her craft, her journey from Austria, and why she chose Venice.
Release date: 30 November 2022
Finally we had an illuminating talk with furniture restorer Alvise Boccanegra, who painstakingly repaired a crucifix which was found floating in the church of San Moisè after the floods of November 2019.
Release date: 14 December 2022
All three young artisans bring a fresh energy to the community and discuss the materials they choose with a keen eye on sustainability, re-use and repair.
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Marianna Blier was born in Astrakhan, Russia but moved to Vienna in 2007. She now divides her time between her atelier in Vienna, Austria and her marble studios in Carrara, Italy.
Eminent Californian photographer Gail Skoff introduced Marianna, and when I followed Gail on one of her photography trips, Marianna was standing on a table top, in a large workshop in the centre of Carrara. Wearing goggles and earmuffs she was leaning over a tall sculpture, carving the final touches.
Marianna got a PhD in economics and started out in business. But her true passion was always art and finally she made the jump from finance to becoming a full-time artist.
She speaks about the importance of creativity to all people. At her Austrian company she founded a project to display the art of employees from all over the world. She continues to manage this project and tells how it played a role supporting the influx of Ukrainian refugees in the past year.
Thanks to Gail Skoff for this collaboration and for the fantastic photographs of Marianna.
All photos: Gail Skoff, gailskoff.com – instagram.com/skoffupclose
mariannablier.com
instagram.com/bliermarianna
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Celebrated figurative sculptor Daphné Du Barry speaks seven languages and modelled for Salvador Dali in her 20s. She discusses her bronzes, her love of learning and her faith.
Born in Holland, Daphné studied at Munich University and afterwards, at McGill in Canada. Later she enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris to study modern literature. She had a brief career as a chanteuse in Paris and then became an artist.
She studied drawing with the Hungarian master Akos Szabo, then in Florence she learnt from Marcello Tommasi, one of the great masters of classical figurative sculpture.
Daphné met her husband Jean-Claude Du Barry, an art critic, at the home of Salvador Dali in Spain and it was love at first sight. She tells us of his influence on her and how she values observation and continuing to learn all our lives. ‘Sometimes’, she says, ‘we look but we don’t see’.
Her first huge monument was The Baptism of Clovis by St. Remi, in Rheims, France in 1996. It was during the making of this statue of the first catholic king of France that she met Pope John Paul II, which changed her life.
D’Artagnan in Gascony, captain of the musketeers, was created with her husband’s memory in mind, a project he would have loved her to realise.
daphne-dubarry.com
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Renowned sculptor Helaine Blumenfeld continually re-invents herself in her search for a vocabulary of form.
Helaine’s work communicates on all levels: visual, tactile and emotional. She is well-known for her public art and her sculptures often seems weightless as she strives to portray something spiritual. Her work is a continuous journey of discovery and growth.
Helaine tells us about becoming an artist, her unstoppable urge to create and how she first came to Pietrasanta 50 years ago.
She now divides her working life between Pietrasanta, Italy, and Cambridge, UK and has been honoured in both countries. In 2007, she was the first woman to be awarded the prestigious ‘International Sculpture Prize: Pietrasanta and Versilia in the World’ and in 2011 was awarded an honorary OBE for services to the arts.
In her recent exhibition, Intimacy and Isolation, Helaine explores beyond the level of personal relationships to our place in the world as her sculptures express what it means to be connected and to share perspectives.
Flame, is part of the outdoor exhibition of art in Pietrasanta placed on Via Oberdan.
Links
helaineblumenfeld.com
instagram.com/helaineblumenfeldobe
Credits
Sound edit and design: Mike Axinn
Music: courtesy of Audio Network
- Fading Colours 1596/2, by Paul Mottram
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Nilda Comas knew she’d be an artist from a very young age, and now she’ll be the first Hispanic master sculptor to create a statue for the US National Statuary Hall. She describes her journey, from a childhood in Puerto Rico to coming to Italy and learning carving skills from the artisans in Pietrasanta.
Following the shocking Charleston church shooting in 2015, the State of Florida decided to change one of the two sculptures representing them in the National Statuary Hall in Washington. They chose to honour Dr Mary McLeod Bethune, educator, philanthropist and civil rights activist. Then, from 1600 entries, Nilda Comas won the commission to create the statue in marble.
Nilda explains how creating a statue of Dr Mary McLeod Bethune was such an extraordinary commission for her. Bethune was born the 15th of 17 children in 1875, in Mayesville, South Carolina to former slaves. As a young child she became eager to learn how to read and write, and soon education – for herself, her siblings and other African Americans – became her key ambition.
Mary McLeod Bethune founded a school for African American students in Daytona Beach, Florida, which later became Bethune-Cookman University.
In 1911, Bethune opened the first black hospital in Daytona, Florida. She became a friend to Eleanor Roosevelt and subsequently an adviser to president Franklin D Roosevelt in what was unofficially known as his Black Cabinet. Bethune was the only woman of colour at the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945.
This episode follows the creation of this special commission from Florida’s decision to change their statue, Nilda winning the commission, finding the stone, the process of creating the sculpture, through to the moment it was unveiled in Italy in July 2021. All against the challenges of the last three years.
After the statue was unveiled in Pietrasanta in July 2021 it was shipped to Florida and went on view in Daytona Beach, before taking a short tour to Bethune’s birthplace in Mayesville, South Carolina. Finally it will make its way to the US Capitol for inauguration in the summer of 2022.
We hear from some of the 54 visitors who came to Pietrasanta from the USA for this special event and hear what the African American statue means to them.
Contributors
Thanks to all the contributors to this episode:
- Nilda Comas, master sculptor
- Nancy Lohman, chair of the Dr Mary McLeod Bethune Statuary Fund
- Derrick Henry, mayor of Daytona Beach
- Dr Hiram Powell, interim president of Bethune-Cookman University
- Rev Thom Shafer of Fort Myers
- Kathy Castor, Florida Democratic US representative
- Shonterika Hall, Bethune-Cookman alumni
- Khalil Bradley, Bethune-Cookman alumni
- Hannah Randolph, Bethune-Cookman alumni
- Sarah Slaughter, Bethune-Cookman alumni
- Jacari W Harris, former B-CU student government president and social justice activist
- Yolanda Cash Jackson, lawyer and lobbyist.
Links
- nildacomas.com
- Nilda on Facebook
- Member of the National Sculpture Society
- Giancarlo Burrati clay studios
- Cervietti marble studios
- Franco del Chiaro foundry
- Documentary film excerpt on Mary McLeod Bethune from Bethune Statuary Fund
Credits
Sound edit and design: Guy Dowsett
Sound recordist: Andrea Gobbi @magazzenosoundproject and @andreagobbi_music
Narrative consultant: Mike Axinn at One to One Box
Music: all courtesy of Audio Network
- The Mist On The River, 3424/3 James Taylor
- Stuff Of Life, 2017/9 Philip Sheppard
- Welcome To Utopia, 3110/2 Philip Sheppard
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on form is an exhibition of sculptures in stone held every other summer at Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire. Discover what goes on during its installation.
Creative director, Rosie Pearson tells us about the finials by Anthony Turner on her gateposts which she commissioned in 2000, and how these sowed the seeds for creating on form.
We hear from the curator, Anna Greenacre, about how she and Rosie choose artists through studio visits, then work alongside them to select pieces for the exhibition. She describes how her master wall-planner acts as a powerful tool in helping to place sculptures to their best advantage in the garden.
In this episode you’ll hear some of the sculptors sharing their thoughts about what they love about working with stone and what work they are presenting at on form this year.
on form is created with love and encourages visitors to wander and absorb the beauty of the sculpture and know that there is no need to understand what it means, just enjoy it.
Resident animals, with bags of character, include Lovage, the not-quite Jack Russell and Ziggy the cat with a half black, half white face.
In the weeks before opening, the sculptors descend in groups to install their work, many staying a few nights in the beautiful house and creating a core team to help other sculptors unpack and place their work. We recorded this podcast when installation was in full swing and share the behind-the-scenes stories of how the community of artists, staff, gardeners – and even neighbours with tractors – all played their part.
Rosie considers herself a custodian of the 18 acres of nature and is committed to biodiversity. She works with ecologist Tim Mitchell, who is running the walled garden as a food-share scheme: ‘some for the birds, some for the bugs and some for us’.
We also hear from head gardener, Owen Vaughan, who brings to perfect readiness the 100% organic garden, originally designed and planted by Isabel and Julian Bannerman in 1998, for the four long weekends of on form.
The 2022 exhibition of on form runs from 12 June to 10 July – open Wednesday to Sundays (closed Monday and Tuesday) – book tickets online.
onformsculpture.co.uk
instagram.com/on_form_sculpture
Thanks to all the contributors to this programme:
- Rosie Pearson, creative director
- Anna Greenacre, curator
- Owen Vaughan, head gardener
- Deandra Barrett, administrative assistant
- Annie Taylor, Rosie’s daughter
Thanks to the sculptors:
- Sergio Baroni
- Rob Good
- Lotte Thuenker
- Jason Mulligan
- Richard Perry
- Christine Madies
- Jaya Schuerch
- Mark Stonestreet
- Ben Russell
Credits
Sound edit and design: Mike Axinn
Music: licensed from Epidemic Sound
- I Will Hold Onto You (instrumental version), Garden Friend
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From a very young age Flavia drew and painted. She was always asking everyone around her for paper and colours because drawing was her language and her refuge. It was her way of processing everything that happened to her, much as some people use writing.
Flavia is inspired by her childhood and her work often ends up being self-portraits. Even if she tries to invent different characters behind her pieces, they always end up being her.
Flavia is fond of working with wood and says that although there are similarities between wood and marble they have subtly different languages. She describes how wood, being easier to handle and able to be moved around without asking for help, makes it a material that guarantees her more independence.
Flavia co-founded La Polveriera, one of the last remaining studios in the centre of Pietrasanta, with her childhood friend Veronica Fonzo. But when the building was sold to developers, Flavia set up a new studio on the edge of Pietrasanta called Tre Luci. Here she and a handful of colleagues can work in peace without complaints about noise or dust.
The founding members each have an inside studio to show their work and create dust-free pieces, and an outdoor workshop for everything else. There are also some outdoor spaces available for guests to rent.
Some members of Tre Luci include have also been featured on Materially Speaking including Jim Hager, Jacob Cartwright and Rita Meier.
Unfortunately Flavia’s show in Florence mentioned in the podcast has come and gone, but for more up-to-date information on her work check out:
flaviarobalo.com
instagram.com/flaviarobalo
This episode refers to:
- Anna Stella Belli, linguist and art curator
- Studio La Polveriera
- Franco Cervietti
- Tre Luci
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Veronica was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where her mother taught drawing and painting. She learned alongside her mother’s students, discovered clay and soon started creating small animals and other subjects from nature. By the time she was a teenager it was clear that art was her path.
She came to Pietrasanta, along with childhood friend Flavia Robalo, to learn how to carve marble. They fell in love with the area and when Martin Foot introduced them to the ex-Cervietti studios they joined him there. Gradually they took over running the space and founded La Polveriera studios, known for its strong community of artists and holding special events.
La Polveriera was on the site of one of the last remaining historic studios in the centre of Pietrasanta where artisans had carved marble for more than 100 years. Franco Cervietti had his studio there for 40 years, and when he moved to bigger premises he left his large collection of historic gessos in the attic.
Recent members of La Polveriera whose stories have been featured on Materially Speaking including Jim Hager, Neil Ferber, Jake Cartwright and Rita Meier.
Veronica often creates centaurs, firstly because she loves animals and feels at one with them, secondly because she is especially fond of the centaur Chiron, who was the first educator in mythology. She often depicts children with the centaurs. Sometimes the centaurs carry the children, sometimes the children become the centaurs – gentle and sweet but also determined and independent. She is inspired by the child inside all of us, learning and moving forward, and growing with our intuition. Veronica’s most frequent themes are childhood, education and growth.
Veronica also creates paintings and sculptures of children and animals, particularly dogs.
Sadly La Polveriera studios closed at the end of 2020, but Veronica has now created her own studio space immersed in nature and next to her home where she is able to concentrate on developing her own work. Her themes are the same but she is experimenting with new techniques such as using robots and creating centaurs with very thin legs. She remains very close with her friends from La Polveriera.
veronicafonzo.com
instagram.com/veronicafonzo
This episode refers to:
- Anna Stella Belli, linguist and art curator
- Studio La Polveriera
- Franco Cervietti
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Filippo is a vivacious 24-year-old student at Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara which was founded in 1769 by Maria Teresa Cybo, princess of Carrara, to support the marble industry. The Academy was founded with two schools: sculpture and architecture, but over the centuries painting, scenography, decoration and graphics were added. However, Filippo has chosen to specialise in the most recent addition: new art technologies, founded in 1999, which trains artists in digital media skills.
Filippo has lived his whole life in Monteggiori, a small fortified medieval village dating back to 1224, perched above Pietrasanta with a strategic view over the Versilia plains and the sea. As cars are forbidden, everyone has to walk up the steep cobbled path carrying their provisions, and if anyone urgently needs the hospital you’ll see men bobbing down over the cobbles bearing them on a stretcher. There’s a brown dog on duty in the car park and many feisty cats which wander from house to house demanding food and attention. It’s a close-knit and colourful community.
Filippo’s parents run La Bottega dell’Arte, and being experts in the traditional arts of gilding and silvering, restore furniture, picture frames and antiques. Using these skills they have done restoration projects for the church of San Stefano in Monteggiori. Meanwhile, Filippo straddles both the old world and the new. This is reflected in the two projects he’s chosen for his course theses, both of which he hopes will give something back to his village.
His first thesis will explore how the digital revolution could help modernise the exhibition space of Monteggiori Arte, a cultural association and gallery space located in an historic home. The gallery can be found as you walk up into the village next to the frescoed arch, with a dragon by artist Tano Pisano, weaving in and out of its walls.
For the second thesis, Filippo uses 3D technology to create a spare key for San Stefano church. He presents the key to the priest during a special Sunday service and in a slideshow on his iPad (set within a gilded picture frame devised in his parents’ workshop) shows the congregation how the various stages of reverse engineering created the key.
LinkedIn: /filippodalleluche
Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara
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With abstract calligraphic lines, Julia Vance creates sculptural forms in white Italian Statuario marble. She tells us how she created a modern altar, font and pulpit for a new church in Hønefoss, Norway, which replaced the previous church which had burnt down.
In this episode, Julia describes a piece she was finishing called Passage to Knowledge. Carved in black granite, this monumental sculpture is like a huge letter Q, signifying a question. It comprises a circle with a tail, and is a portal you can pass through.
Julia believes the value of questions is far more important than students being filled up with answers. Passage to Knowledge was unveiled in the schoolyard of the newly opened Flesberg school, Norway, in September 2019. Julia created the piece to honour curiosity and encourage children to engage and play with it.
Another work which plays with calligraphic forms is HOLD #2. This sculpture is inspired by the sweeping lines and curves of the letters H, L and D. The piece invites you to curl up inside the cavity and become the missing letter O. Before going on display in Holland Park, London, HOLD #2 was shown in front of the Norwegian Parliament.
The sculpture group WE-ME #5 was inspired by the idea that the word ‘me’ can easily be turned upside-down to form a ‘we’, much the same way an individual ‘me’ can join a group and become part of a ‘we’. First displayed in 2014 in front of Oslo Central station, the piece has wheels fastened to the side allowing members of the public to rotate the words.
Since 2005 Julia has divided her time between Norway and Italy, creating her letter- and word-inspired sculptures. Having spent most of the pandemic in Norway, she is looking forward to returning to her studio in Pietrasanta to work on new commissions.
juliavance.no
instagram.com/juliavance1
Royal Society of Sculptors
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Guus Jooss lives in Holland but comes to Pietrasanta in Italy for several months a year to work in marble.
Guus used to work as a museum teacher and researcher in the Netherlands when he wasn’t creating his own art. Before that, he went to an art academy in Utrecht for a year, but mostly learnt about sculpture through doing the work himself. He also did some teaching and found himself describing for his students skills that he didn’t realise he’d learnt.
When working in marble he considers himself rather old-fashioned as his heroes are artists of earlier generations: Henry Moore, Constantin Brâncuși, Alberto Viani, Isamu Noguchi and Hans Arp, all of whom had a classical, figurative, training but then moved on to pure form. He likes the honesty of one form made in one material.
With an affinity to antiquity, Guus makes collages that reference his love of history. Old civilizations that are lost are recreated by him in images which look a little like tapestries or Persian rugs. He’s fascinated by the regularity of geometric patterns that Islamic artists made in the sixth and seventh centuries. He talks us through his process and the way he expresses the layers of history.
Guus tells how Homo Ludens, a book by Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga, explains the importance of play in society. Like Huizinga, Guus believes that adult creativity should be approached with the same urgency that a child approaches play, that is to say, as a matter of life and death.
A keen swimmer, Guus found that open water swimming strengthened his lungs after what may, or may not have been, a dose of Covid. At the beginning of lockdown he enjoyed the chance to focus on work, but the need for a hug finally forced him to admit that isolation was actually a difficult experience.
Since this episode was recorded in September 2020, we’ve had another winter of lockdown. Like others who moved out of towns and cities during the pandemic, Guus relocated from Utrecht to the countryside where he has fresher air and more studio space.
guusjooss.nl
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Badriah Hamelink comes from a family of Dutch intellectuals. Her mother is a professor, while her father is the poet and writer Jaques Hamelink. Her grandmother founded the first Arab study centre in the Netherlands.
Her own artistic development however has leant more towards the intuitive than the rational, and when she followed her nose to Pietrasanta she sought mentoring from the artist Armen Agop. Badriah also credits Martin Foot who taught her many carving techniques.
Badriah’s abstract style explores the essence of our existence, and what lies beneath it.
The piece A3A is visible from both sides. The two objects act as a duet and, as is often the case with kindred spirits, the apparent similarity of the objects also directs the viewers’ attention to their minute differences.
Recently Badriah had a near-fatal accident due to a four-and-a-half metre fall resulting in heavy concussion. While recovering, she started playing around with and reworking old images she’d taken, by ‘mirroring’ some of them. What she discovered led her to an awareness of the importance of reflection and symmetry as a way of expressing the qualities of balance and equanimity.
Badriah found that if you held a shape against a mirror you immediately see something organic – even the most inorganic surface will seem to produce an organism in front of your eyes. It’s what our minds are wired to do.
The first piece that Badriah made after her accident was PROLIFERATIO which consists of a block of two tons of salt, split in half and a cast of the rupture in black polyester. Where the pure and natural salt has opened up, the black synthetic proliferates out of its core, as if a tumour growing at the same speed as the mineral. It seems to suggest: ‘At the moment of birth our death is born as well’ which, Badriah says, is the only certainty we have. This work is currently in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Sotto Sale, Sicily.
The relief, A5B.2, was inspired by photographs from the Hubble deep space telescope of two extraordinarily thin galaxies, NGC 4452 and OPO 0624. Badriah created a heightmap of the visual data and based a sculpture on it’s features. The work re-materializes the far-away light sources to throw a rippling onto the physical surface.
In 2017 Badriah founded Atelier BSH which continues to produce her artworks in stone and metal. Her work has been displayed in galleries and museums in New York, Luxembourg, Stockholm, Milan, Prague, Hawaii and Amsterdam.
Constantly experimenting with new materials and always driven to further her career as an artist, Badriah recently applied herself to learning the ancient Japanese art of stone splitting.
badriah-hamelink.com
instagram.com/badriah_hamelink
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Born in Wales, Neil Ferber started his creative life making models and objects in his parents’ garden shed. After art college he made his way to Italy with his wife, writer Kathleen Jones, where he discovered the artist community working in marble and based himself in several of the studios there. At the time of our interview he was packing-up from Studio La Polveriera in Pietrasanta and now mainly works in Cumbria at his Mill studios.
Neil’s sculptures are abstract and often architectural or geometric in form, initially created in clay or wax before being cast in a variety of more permanent materials. He composes fully three-dimensional pieces where no one view dominates, all being of equal interest. Neil’s work is held in private collections in Italy, Sweden, England and the USA.
Neil speaks of his friendship with Italian-born Fiore de Henriquez in Peralta. She was sculptor to the famous, a flamboyant character and proud hermaphrodite who created portrait sculptures of John F Kennedy, Igor Stravinsky and the Queen Mother and is credited for introducing Cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz to Pietrasanta. In love with clay, a film of her life by Richard Whymark, tells more of her story.
Our interview took place in il CRO di Pietrasanta, an historic workers’ restaurant which has fed generations of artisans and remains a meeting place for artists. On the walls frames have been painted in which artists can sketch their contributions, while live music nights are a popular fixture here.
neilferber.co.uk
instagram.com/neil_ferber
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Cynthia Sah was born in Hong Kong and studied in the USA. She first came to Italy in 1978 to study and came back soon after to learn with the artisans. She has stayed ever since and now works in a studio complex with her partner, Nicolas Bertoux.
Inspired by the form, movement and colours that nature gives us, Cynthia tells how she always looks for the spine in a piece. She loves how the energy of a wave – of water, sound or wind – reminds her that we are all connected.
Gallery spaces being altogether different to her studio environment, Cynthia prefers to settle her pieces into their new home personally. But lockdown entailed her having to learn to curate a show long-distance this year. Here she describes the process.
Cynthia creates public art for all over the world. She talks about a special commission she did for a grieving daughter in memory of her father, called Balance & Counterbalance.
Underpinning her public art is the idea that sculptures should be friendly and invite you to touch or sit on them.
Finally Cynthia takes me to their basement, and what was originally a trout farm feeding the Medicis in the Palace opposite. This breathtaking long gallery is now their exhibition space, where they host events for their non-profit foundation, Arkad.
cynthiasah.it
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After studying zoology, then going to art school in Bournemouth, Anne tells how it was the traditional teaching of Signorina Simi in Florence that made her feel she was finally in the right place.
Anne stayed in touch with her fellow students who learnt with the artist and teacher Nera Simi (1890–1987) alongside her in the 1980s. Even when it was seen as out of fashion, Nera Simi continued to teach by the atelier method having learnt it from her father, Filadelfo Simi who had studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904). This link with the past gave Anne a close connection to the classic academic traditions of the late 1800s. Recently she felt moved to do a bust of her highly esteemed teacher which she called simply, Nera Simi.
Anne has lived in Italy since 1980 and developed her own painting style combining her keen sense of observation, love of animals and Renaissance drafting skills. For many years she has also been coming to Pietrasanta to cast her sculptures in the foundries.
Facing the future, a bronze of a male mute swan flapping its wings after preening, is the culmination of Anne’s long-held dream to sculpt a larger-than-life-size swan. It was cast at Fonderia Artistic Mariani and in a PDF on her website she describes how the sculpture was created.
During the first, strict, lockdown in Italy Anne says she felt like a prisoner in her own home. Her painting Balcony expresses the fear she experienced during this period. When it became apparent that she might be at home for some time, she decided to set achievable goals to give herself a routine. Every evening she painted the sunset from her balcony initiating a project involving the close study of light. You can read more about this on her blog.
It was during this project that she noticed how each evening a passenger train passed by and the moving carriages picked up and reflected the setting sunlight. As well as the train, little glints of strong light could be glimpsed elsewhere too — on the gutterings, the aerials and the shiny-leaved magnolia tree, the top of which Anne could just include in the foreground of her painting, The 7:30 train.
Anne describes the close relationship between sculptor and model, and the moment the sculpture ‘comes to life’ for the artist. She references the painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme (below). The motif is taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and depicts the sculptor Pygmalion kissing his statue Galatea at the moment the goddess Aphrodite brings her to life.
www.anneshingleton.com
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Originally from Paris, Nicolas first came to Carrara with his father, also a sculptor, who was working on a monumental piece at Henraux.
Now he lives and works in Seravezza, northern Tuscany with his partner Cynthia Sah, in an extraordinary pre-industrial building which was once an historic sawmill, where marble was cut for the very first time by water-powered machinery.
He was drawn to move to the area not because of the studios and artisans, but because of the quarries. He likens the search for raw material to buying your food at a farm instead of a supermarket. He wants to talk to the quarrymen and know the chain of production.
The Wind Tree project was due to be installed just as the pandemic hit so instead of installing the piece himself Nicolas had to box it very carefully, then guide people at the other end to erect it in his absence.
When Nicolas was approached by the coastguard, and forced to pay an administrative fine for a lack of paperwork, he and other sculptors created a work of protest – Protesta (Yell).
nicolasbertoux.it
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Co-founder of Studio Pescarella near Pietrasanta, Jaya was born in California, moved to Switzerland with her family as a teenager, and later lived in Hawaii where she worked in papier-mâché, lava and basalt. In 1986 she came to Carrara attracted by the marble quarries. Jaya says ‘it’s important to me that my sculptures feel alive, pulling out the aliveness in the stone, showing the absolute connection that stone has for me with life.’
At one point in the interview Jaya explains how she experiences the difference between the white marbles of Italy, Greece and China. We also hear how important it was for her to learn skills from the artisans of Pietrasanta when she first arrived.
Physics, gravity, black holes and planetary motion have long been a source of inspiration for Jaya, perhaps because of her background. As well as art, she also studied engineering, biology and botany. The theme of suspension is important to her as a metaphor for the tensions of life. In Exploded Spheres, a series of works seek to describe the release of tension. A larger scale work, Suspended Cube, shows how the tension in the cables keeps everything suspended.
Jaya enjoys creating in wax, especially in winter when she can work in front of a hot wax pot. In the process of renovating her house she hurt her hand which meant wielding a hammer and chisel on white marble was not feasible until it healed. Instead, Jaya picked up some wax and created a series of original, unique sculptures, later casting them into bronzes. She reflects on the amazingly varied forms life can take, and how strange it was to have sold one of her pieces – which looked very similar to the coronavirus – to her dentist in 2019.
We talked about lockdown, about the soothing qualities of baking bread and of meditation. Sound of One Hand Clapping references a Buddhist meditation mantra.
Jaya used to be a sailplane instructor in the Alps and there were a few occasions when eagles would fly with her. Those experiences led her to try and capture that magical feeling of soaring within her work Flying.
Jaya made Challah during the first phase of the pandemic and it references one of her favourite poems, A common woman by poet, activist, and scholar Judy Grahn. She created it as a loaf and hopes you might feel you could pull off a section of it. She finds baking a restorative process and suggests it fits well with the preoccupations of lockdown: bread being regarded as the foundation of human life – feeding yourself, your spirit, and others.
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Born in Soissons, France, Emmanuel went to trade school at the age of 16 to learn how to renovate historical monuments by hand, specialising in granite. He spent some years restoring churches, cathedrals and monuments all over France until he felt the calling to create his own work as an artist.
He says women and the female form are a constant source of inspiration. Dance is a strong theme in his work and began with a homage he did for Martha Graham which lives in the outdoor sculpture garden at the Wallis Theatre in Beverly Hills, LA. The models he used from a French dance school in order to make that sculpture impressed him hugely and, he says, gave him a lifetime of inspiration, adding that he felt he was surrounded by walking sculptures.
For a recent show Emmanuel made a triptych of Exaltation – one carved in white marble, another cast in polished white bronze, and the third in natural bronze with a patina. He explains how he wanted to illustrate how the same subject feels completely different when created in a different material.
Emmanuel displays his extraordinary carving skills in his portrayals of Kinbaku – the Japanese art of tying rope around a person using visually intricate patterns, typically with several pieces of thin rope (often jute, hemp or linen). He believes the practice is empowering because the people are not tied in their mind, in fact they are very free.
While Emmanuel was carving in white, bianco p and statuario marble, some of his black women friends asked why he didn’t sculpt black women. He says, ‘I felt like, well, I’m not going to sculpt a black woman in white marble. It kind of doesn’t make sense because part of their beauty is their colour. I mean, it’s not a colour, but it’s being black. So I went to a quarry in Belgium and purchased some beautiful black marble blocks. And it’s really an homage to them. And I hope they’re happy, but I think a lot of them, they express their contentment.’
Emmanuel describes how he was affected by the fires in California and the south of France. He admires the resilience of nature whereby a forest is reborn afterwards, growing back twice as beautiful. It was then that he started to make pieces with burnt wood.
Emmanuel comes from a family with a famous painter, Jean Cousin the Elder. Cousin was a Renaissance painter who painted Eva prima Pandora in 1500, which is in the Louvre, Paris.
Emmanuel and I met at Massimo Galleni Studios, who specialise in reproducing classical sculptures, just outside Pietrasanta. He also referred to Mario Tavarelli who showed Emmanuel around when he first arrived in Carrara in 1995. Mario was the owner of a marble company and had guided the novelist Irving Stone during his research for his book on Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy.
emmanuelfillion.com
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Lucy Dickens is an artist and illustrator, whose works exudes humour. Close friends since the age of three, Lucy and Sarah ramble and percolate over Lucy’s upcoming show.
As a great, great granddaughter of writer Charles Dickens, writing plays an important part in Lucy’s life. Her paintings often have a narrative quality, leaving you wondering what went before, or what will happen next. As well as humour, her recent work contains a lot of vibrant colour and exuberance.
After school Lucy studied fashion journalism and started as a stylist at Condé Nast, where she soon became fashion editor of Brides magazine. Her passion for materials, and how people express themselves through fashion, continues to this day. When she started her own family she began writing and illustrating childrens’ books which were published in London and New York.
This May she has a show at Cricket Fine Art and as the catalogue arrived she and Sarah flick through it with Lucy explaining the background behind the pictures. She says she likes to portray groups of people and works in many mediums from oils, acrylics and gouaches, to bold graphic fabric collages. The series of Japanese paintings reflect her love of travel.
Lucy often puts in a cameo appearance in her own work. A self-portrait below shows her framed within a picture At the Picasso Museum and again in Cyclists and Whippets, Hyde Park Corner where you can she her as a passenger peeping out of the back of a bus, centre left of painting.
A great observer of people, lover of dogs and fan of London, Cyclist and Whippets, Hyde Park Corner speaks of Lucy’s skill to snatch a view from a bus and make it immortal.
Lucy comes from a creative family. Her mother Julia Dickens paints, while her sister Sophie Dickens is a renowned sculptor whose work you can see at Sladmore Contemporary Gallery, or on her website: sophiedickens.co.uk.
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Welcome back to a second series of Materially Speaking – where artists and artisans tell us their stories through the materials they choose.
In these snapshot stories, they tell us about their journey to become an artist, and the inspirations for their work. Along the way, they explain why they have chosen different materials to work with at different stages of their careers.
Materially Speaking began with interviews from artists and artisans working near Pietrasanta in northern Italy, where generations of artists have come since Michelangelo first arrived over 500 years ago to source marble for his Pietà.
We are taking a break for the summer but we have already started recording new interviews and look forward to sharing more artists’ stories later this year. We will continue our conversations with artists who work, or have worked, around the area of Pietrasanta and will discover how the current pandemic has influenced them.
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Sollai Cartwright takes inspiration from everything around him creating both abstract and figurative work.
Sollai talks about his favourite stone, Bianco P, and how it responds to chisels while holding its form. He speaks about the historical resources of the area around Pietrasanta and of the extensive range of historical tools available, especially at the renowned Milani Tools shop. He describes how each tool has a different relationship with a different stone.
In 2019, Sollai exhibited at Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe and Bondi and had a solo show at Harvey Galleries in Mosman, Sydney, Australia.
From the age of seven, Danica, who would go on to marry Sollai, trained as a gymnast and trampolinist, later becoming an acrobat with Cirque du Soleil where she and Sollai met. She explains a little about their team work approach with her doing the management and marketing of his art.
Sollai mentions the power of having a mentor and cites the guidance he received from Douglas Robinson, a Canadian sculptor who has also spoken to Materially Speaking.
Sollai comes from a family of artists and you can hear the stories of his father, Michael Francis Cartwright; mother, Shona Nunan and brother, Jacob Cartwright all on Materially Speaking. In 2018, along with the rest of his family, he showed his work in Australia House, London in an exhibition that celebrated a centenary since its construction on the Strand.
sollai.com
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Born into an artistic family in Australia, Jacob has been living in Italy, on and off, since he was two-years-old. He began his musical training very young and brings these sensibilities to his art. All the music in this episode was composed by Jacob.
The Embrace series was inspired by a hug Jacob’s wife Jacqueline gave him. He explains that when his wife gave him a hug he saw a certain form. This form became a piece and this piece then developed into a series of work about the embrace. He also feels that his deep links with music played a part in influencing the outcome. He says, ‘It’s a beautiful subject matter because an embrace is a paradox: giving and receiving at the same time. It’s like two things at once and everything at once’.
Jacob loves carving wood and working to optimise its fibre and grain, discovering how it might split or break. He describes his love of the textures of wood and explains both the process of burning wood and using the burnt wood with oil to make a patina. Sometimes in making a sculpture he will cover whole sections of wood with nails.
Jacob usually worked with the aid of machinery but admits that he hasn’t yet made up his mind about whether or not to use a robot in future. When health and safety regulations around dust became an issue, Jacob decided to embrace a change within his studio and reverted to working marble by hand and avoid machinery altogether. He tells us how this meditative way of working influences his life.
jacobcartwright.com
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Christian Lange apprenticed as a chiseller in Freiburg, Germany, and started out as a stonemason restoring churches before coming to Pietrasanta to try his luck as an artist. Then he fell in love and his work took a slightly different direction. He decided to build his career as an artisan and now creates ornamental pieces and sacred art, as well as collaborating with artists to realise their visions in marble.
He talks about the responsibility of selecting a block of marble to work on, outlining some of the challenges in finding the right piece for a particular work.
Christian also teaches sculpting courses and has his own apprentices. He reflects on the new technology acknowledging that an air hammer or electric powered chisel, ubiqitous in sculpting today, would be considered a devil’s tool by the artisans of a hundred years ago. He laments the dearth of young apprentices coming up the ranks. In his day, he says ‘the apprenticeship was three years where we worked only by hand. No electric power tools, no air pressure, everything with really very old-fashioned hand-tools. Slow. But for learning, I still believe that learning something slowly is probably better.’
He loves the challenge of making figurative work but says that it is more expensive because it takes much more time.
marbleartwork.com
Stagetti Marble Studio
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Rita Meier learned the direct carving technique from artisans and the international community of artists in the studios around Pietrasanta. In this episode she talks about the grades of hardness of various stones and describes the process of carving.
Inspired by organic shapes, Rita discusses her seed pods series which she sees as the carriers and protectors of future lives, always perfectly adapted to survive in their environment.
Rita describes her fascination for limpets, very old beings which cling to almost anything while cleaning the water they live in. She loves their shapes and wanted to carve them into the surface of marble, as they appear in nature.
‘It started out with leftover pieces of statuario,’ she says. ‘Since they were not cut but removed manually with one blow of the hammer, the crystalline surface remains untouched, looking like snow glittering in the sun.’
She had the idea to carve limpet fossils on some river rocks of marble she had, adding a natural iron-coloured patina. Though fossils don’t appear naturally in Carrara marble, Rita played around and carved ‘fossils’ into the marble so that they look almost real.
Rita Meier at INTRECCIArte
instagram.com/ritameiersculpture/
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Californian artist Neal Barab says his work is variously influenced by Mexican pre-Colombian art, art from the Cyclades, African art, Japanese anime such as My Neighbor Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki and cartoons.
Recently he’s been working on a series of ‘personaggi’, or characters – human and animal – carved from multicoloured stones, some painted. Neal says ‘I’m wanting my pieces to be not just sculptures but living creatures.’ Their personalities are deliberately vibrant.
He talks about particular pieces he prepared for his show. Big Dog and Lil Dog are made from marble and olive wood from his own olive trees. When Neal does his ‘potatura,’ or pruning of trees, he’s always on the lookout for bits that might contribute to a sculpture. Trav Fem is a female form with splendid hair made out of crystal formations.
He also shows one of the ping-pong tables he created, this one made from four pieces of marble with a yellow piece acting as a net.
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When Almuth Tebbenhoff came to London in the late 1960s she started from scratch: learning a new language, finding a job and studying to be a potter.
A decade later, a lucky meeting with Eduardo Paolozzi gave her the chance to study at the Royal College of Art where drawing classes, lectures and conversations with other artists led her from the world of ceramics to a wider range of materials.
Almuth first came to Pietrasanta to work in marble in 2006. She talks about a few special projects she created in stone including a series of interlocked nutshell type boats, which appear to toss and turn on their journey.
Another commission, Flow, lived outside the Salisbury Museum and reflects Almuth’s fascination for patterns made by water. It’s this piece which she was restoring on the day Sarah Monk went to interview her.
tebbenhoff.org
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Almuth is vice-president of the Royal Society of Sculptors
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After what he describes as a ‘very free’ art education, Australian-born Michael Francis Cartwright first came to Carrara in Italy 35 years ago with his wife Shona Nunan. Michael says ‘the main thing in my life is about creating something the whole time’ and discusses the many mediums he employs.
Michael likes drawing, painting, printmaking, working with beautiful red hardwoods and carving marble. He also works with found objects, often discarded items, ‘old toys, bits of stick, anything’, and takes them to the local art foundry to get them cast in bronze. Once he ripped the back off an old truck and used the metal to make a sculpture.
nunan-cartwright.com
instagram.com/nunan.cartwright.art
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Liverpudlian Martin Foot always loved learning and since childhood dreamt of carving in stone. At the age of 13 he worked weekends for his uncle, a stone mason. At 19 he took a one-way ticket to Australia to try his luck and found himself carving in the company of Italians, who spoke of home. This sowed the seeds in Martin’s mind of some day working there himself. In 1996 he finally came to Italy, arriving in Pietrasanta at the end of a golden age when small sculpture studios still existed throughout the town.
Martin speaks of his essential faith in today's youth. He believes if we give them an opportunity they’ll take it. ‘We’re responsible for them’ he says. He helps young carvers where he can, adding, ‘what’s a mistake? It's a mistake if you don’t learn by an error.’
He finds working in restoration invaluable because by looking at the original pieces, he's made aware of the level he needs to achieve. As Martin says, 'if you’re not studying it, you won’t know how high the bar is. If you want to know how good you are, don’t compare yourself to the person standing next to you, go into one of the beautiful art galleries'.
martinfoot.com
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Shona Nunan and her husband, Michael Francis Cartwright, left Australia for Italy to tell the world, and themselves, that they were committed to being artists. They arrived in Carrara, near the white marble mountains 35 years ago, without even enough money to eat the workers’ lunches. She tells her story, from peering longingly into the bronze foundries of Pietrasanta to finally realising her dreams.
During Shona’s career, recurring themes have emerged in her work: ancestors, women, guardian figures and horses and riders. She reflects on the various influences that have shaped her and how her art has changed over the years. Now living in France, she speaks of the people and travels that have helped make her the artist she is today.
nunan-cartwright.com
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Eilis O’Connell studied at art school in Cork, Ireland in the early 1970s. She was fascinated by making something small and then realising it big. Here she shares with us the amazing range of the materials she’s worked with and her new-found admiration for marble.
Eilis says ‘I just love experimenting, as a natural thing. I’m a real messer. I like to see what a material can do and play with it.’
She touches upon a wide variety of subjects in this episode: copyright, the power of the plinth, her love for archaeology, cleaning sculptures, churches, and of course her passion for exploring different materials.
eilisoconnell.com
instagram.com/eilisoconnell_sculptor
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Canadian Douglas Robinson arrived in Pietrasanta in 1979 to learn from the artisans. He worked with Jørgen Sørensen and took to stone as his main medium for expression. He explains how the support network for the marble industry makes the area unique for artists to work in.
He talks about the enormous range of stone available there and why the artists are particularly drawn to work with the famous white marble of Carrara. He recommends the cemetery in Genoa, northern Italy, as a place to see detailed work of artisans which has lasted for centuries.
douglasrobinson-sculptor.com
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Eppe de Haan was born in Arnhem, Holland and studied art at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. Originally a painter, he came to Pietrasanta to try his hand at carving marble in 1995. There he started carving in a studio in Querceta before joining SEM Studios where the artisans shared their skills and experience.
As a figurative painter his work followed a similar theme as he moved to carving in marble and he specialises in the nude figure and face fragments.
Eppe is a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors.
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Jim Hager, from California, has been carving marble in Pietrasanta, Northern Italy, for almost 30 years. He talks to us about his Sculpture for Homeless Project where he has captured the images and voices of the homeless in his home town of Oakland, California, and is creating an exhibition which will feature a cardboard “House of Cards” carved from one block of marble.
He speaks of his inspiration, and how he hopes his art can be a vehicle for social change. In a strange twist of fate, the studio he works in in Italy, La Polveriera is also under threat from the developers.
hagersculpture.com
instagram.com/jimhagersculpture
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Stephan Hamel – a brand catalyst who divides his time between Milan, Vienna and Pietrasanta – tells the story of his Italian grandfather laying marble in palaces in India in the years both before and after Independence from the British.
Stephan reflects on the many ways in which marble has represented power over the generations, and observes that the artists may not always support the politics involved. He ponders on the number of dictators whose effigies have been commissioned in marble, and how many of those subjects were toppled from power before their statues could be installed.
stephanhamel.com
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A woman artist often has to juggle family matters at the same time as fulfilling her own creative dreams. The seeds for Turid finding her way to Pietrasanta came from a chance meeting with the esteemed sculptor Helaine Blumenfeld when Turid was 18. However it took nearly 40 years for her to make her way to working in marble. Her story is one of strength and determination.
She tells us about her Nuova Vita project - a series of baptism dresses, about 50 cm high, carved from a spectacular range of beautiful stones - and what she is expressing through them. Her inspirational journey shows how we can all make strides in the face of life’s setbacks and how she took a chance on a new life.
Turid’s interview took place in the peach gardens of Studio SEM, founded in the 1950s by Sem Ghelardini and now run by American Keara McMartin. SEM collaborate with artists and sculptors from all over the world to produce marble and granite sculptures of all sizes and you’ll be hearing more from them during the series.
turidgyllenhammar.com
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Some materials are more resistant than others. They always say no. Armen tells us how he discovered a material that suits him. He speaks about marble, basalt and granite and the pros and cons of working in a close artistic community like the one near Pietrasanta.
Giorgio Angeli Studio di Scultora D’Arte is where Armen Agop works and it was here that Armen and Sarah spoke. Armen mentions how he first came to Italy when he was awarded The Rome Prize.
Armen exhibited at the Meem Gallery, a leading institution managing and promoting contemporary Arabic, north African and Iranian art.
Check out Armen’s website to keep up with his current activity.
armenagop.com
instagram.com/armen.agop
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Maria is a figurative artist working mainly with the female figure. She was born in Caracas, Venuzuela, but studied at the Pratt Institute in New York before coming to Pietrasanta in 1973 where she was one of the few women carving in marble.
More recently, Maria helped fulfil the dream of a grieving mother who wanted a special memorial to her daughter who was killed by a drunk driver on a busy stretch of road by the seaside. She tells how the two of them came together to create the sculpture Spirito Libero to remember the girl and act as a warning to drivers.
mariagamundi.it
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Materially Speaking starts with stories from the community of artists working in stone near Pietrasanta, a town in northern Italy. Successive generations of artists have been coming here to source the marble available nearby and work with highly skilled local artisans.
When Sarah saw how fast the lives of artists and artisans in this area were changing, she decided to capture their experiences. They share incredible tales of migration, identity and the strange effects of random acts of kindness. Additionally, they reveal stories of how one community dominated by a single natural resource adapts to constant change.