Chiara Camoni
Chiara Camoni, Sister, 2022. View at Castel Gardena, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Chiara Camoni uses the natural materials that surround her home in Fabbiano, Tuscany—clay, leaves and branches, wood and wool—to make artworks in which ancestral forms, traditional crafts, collaborative practices and ecofeminist theories shape one another. The interplay of very different scales is a defining characteristic of her work, in which small beads and terracotta-based domestic objects co-exist with monumental representations of female divinities and large animal creatures made of wood or clay. In this harmony between the large and small, the crafty and the intellectual, the material and the spiritual, Camoni’s work brings to life fantastic creatures that belong as much to the Earth as to the soul.
Sister is a large clay sculpture of a woman-divinity-sorceress-creature of the woods whose six arms, some of them holding burning candles, echo an insect as much as a mythical being. Made with materials from the Val Gardena, such as white Dolomite dust, minerals from Vallunga and ashes from the pines found between Ortisei and Selva, this Sister faces viewers directly with her ambiguous smile, looking both amused as mischievous, bringing light and shade to those who cross her path.
Chiara Camoni, Sister, 2022. View at Castel Gardena, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Chiara Camoni
Chiara Camoni, Sister, 2022. View at Castel Gardena, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Chiara Camoni uses the natural materials that surround her home in Fabbiano, Tuscany—clay, leaves and branches, wood and wool—to make artworks in which ancestral forms, traditional crafts, collaborative practices and ecofeminist theories shape one another. The interplay of very different scales is a defining characteristic of her work, in which small beads and terracotta-based domestic objects co-exist with monumental representations of female divinities and large animal creatures made of wood or clay. In this harmony between the large and small, the crafty and the intellectual, the material and the spiritual, Camoni’s work brings to life fantastic creatures that belong as much to the Earth as to the soul.
Sister is a large clay sculpture of a woman-divinity-sorceress-creature of the woods whose six arms, some of them holding burning candles, echo an insect as much as a mythical being. Made with materials from the Val Gardena, such as white Dolomite dust, minerals from Vallunga and ashes from the pines found between Ortisei and Selva, this Sister faces viewers directly with her ambiguous smile, looking both amused as mischievous, bringing light and shade to those who cross her path.
Chiara Camoni, Sister, 2022. View at Castel Gardena, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo