About
I am a ceramic sculptor and a potter. I make things from pieces of ground.
I came to clay later in life than I sometimes wish was so. One day at art school, with a naked woman lying down at the front of the room, the teacher dropped a lump of clay on our desks and said simply ‘sculpt’. I really did not know where to start but my hands somehow knew what to do. From that moment forward I stopped “everything else” I was doing to devote myself exclusively to the study of clay.
The way she molds to the hand and remembers shapes, her forgiveness when making mistakes, her smells and colors, all the mysteries and wagers which gather ‘round’ her firing.
At the time I was living in Northern California, where I was fortunate to apprentice for over five years with the sculptor Deborah Bridges.
Sculpture was my first love, and it took me years to turn to pottery because I was infected with the old prejudice that sculpture is art while pottery is craft and considered the first as more worthy of pursuit and study.
I have been fortunate to learn clay in many countries and traditions. Most of my tutelage in sculpture comes from Deborah Bridges.
I learned wheel throwing in the beautiful atelier of Marco Tortarolo in Albisola Marina, as well as the studios of Andrew Sellery and Chic Lotz in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I learned to dig clay, to hand build and to fire from New Yorker Matthew Stillman and the esteemed Oaxacan maestro Lalo Martinez.
My first studio was in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California, the place where the majority of my work was crafted.
After a beautiful year in Ontario, Canada in 2020 during the pandemic and lots of difficult changes, I decided to move back home to the scents and slopes of my people in Northern Italy in the summer of 2021 and it is here I now work from.
