Developments in Stone & Steel

Hi Friends,

I am very overdue for a studio update, and I’m excited to finally share what I’ve been up to and some of the work that has taken shape over the past months. I’m writing this from a ceramics workshop in Puglia at the Fondazione Lac o Lemon, where I’ve been spending the week in creative dialogue and exchange with eight other artists. The workshop, titled Hand Follows Nature, is rooted in themes of geology and archaeology and explores the cycle of earth made materials. I was inspired to participate because of how closely it aligns with my own practice, and being at a distance from my studio and daily life has inspired me to sit down and write.

Participating in this residency has brought me back to the core of my own research, which has long circled around marble sculpture as an entry point into deep time. Marble is literally time embodied, a stone metamorphosed over millennia, carrying the memory of the earth’s geologic evolution. I am drawn to marble both because of its physical form as an ancient material and as a conceptual contrast to our fleeting sense of human time. When marble is carved and shaped by human hands, these vast timescales collide.

This line of thinking has guided much of my recent work, including an exhibition I did in Berlin in February and March titled The Medium is the Message. The show evolved from work I created last year for a public sculpture project in Italy and was directly inspired by this ongoing research. This exhibition became an important turning point in my practice and was presented in a miniature gallery located on a metro platform, a very cool alternative space that gave the work a unique context and visibility.

As I have shared in past newsletters, I have always been interested in using waste and discarded materials, and I choose to work with discards and offcuts from the industrial marble extraction in Carrara. These irregular blocks align perfectly with my geologic inspired research. From them I carve bone like fragments, crescents inspired by the moon, and animalesque forms such as wings and skulls. These motifs seek to highlight the core ideas behind my research, drawing connections between natural cycles, transformation, and the deep time embedded within the material itself.

For a while I felt the need to focus almost exclusively on marble because of the complexity and demands of learning how to sculpt and transform the material. Recently, however, I have been intentionally combining it with steel to create bases and structures that lift my sculptures off the ground. The bases first emerged out of necessity and began with stacking beams, but have since developed into structures that support the marble and integrate more intentionally with the carved forms.

I will be sharing more of this work and my research journey with you soon. I also have a couple pieces available if you are interested in purchasing my sculpture, please get in touch. Thank you, as always, for being part of this community and for supporting the development of my practice.

Best, 

Isotta