Valentina Maggiolo

ESP PINTURA
SITIO ESPECÍFICO
LUGAR + COLOR
EXHIBICIONES
FRESCOS
PERRO BLANCO
BIO/CV
SOBRE MI


ENGPAINTING
SITE SPECIFIC
PLACE + COLOUR
EXHIBITIONS
FRESCOES
PERRO BLANCO
BIO/CV
ABOUT


Hommage
2021

A show with 365 ceramic pieces and paintings at Lima Modern, Lima Peru.

“That joy of living you speak of, sadly, isn’t so constant. I find myself constantly having to renew the reason for my enthusiasm, imagine something, commit to something, but in any case, stir with the little spoon of my own will the sugar that lies at the bottom of things.”


Excerpt from a letter written by Tita Liceti to her dear friend Martha Phillips, August 1961.

After a conversation in 2017 about a letter from her grandmother, the seed idea for Homenaje (Hommage), the artwork by Valentina Maggiolo, emerged. The initial plan was to make a spoon per day for a year—a measure of time both everyday and meaningful—as an exercise in consistency, repetition, and decision-making. Later, the modelling  adjusted to the timescales of working with ceramics and became just a part of the work, no longer its primary goal. In the end it took four years to make the the 365 pieces.

The work is understood as an exercise in focusing: to look towards the horizon, fix one’s gaze on a single point and not lose sight of it. Like contemplating a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, imagining the scent of fleshy, white petals and holding that in the mind.

At first, the spoons were going to be made from the same clay. The first twenty are made from 6018 clay, a grogged earthenware. The rest are all different. After firing them, Valentina realised they resembled relics or archaeological remains. The project shifted—and so did the spoons. Like something organic: everything that disappears in the firing kiln.

Ultimately, the smallest piece resembles a thimble, while the largest evokes an excavator. Something that fits in the palm of your hand, and something larger than yourself. They were no longer spoons for a teacup. They became shovels, excavators, sieves, and bones. They became tools: useful, useless, impossible. Lifebuoys for the imagination; Metaphors for life.

Hommage is an excavation into the personal, familial, and collective memory. To dig into unknown terrain, to discover it, to map it; to shape it with one’s own hands. To bring the shoes down from the pedestal and wear them. And to make of that gesture, a universal act.

Rafaela Maggiolo