Je t'aime

Silvia Celeste Calcagno was born in Genoa in 1974. She currently lives and works in Albissola, Italy. In her practice, ceramics is put in dialogue with other media, performance, installation, photography, and video to investigate her multilayered sense of self. In an obsessive reproduction of herself, the artist speaks of life through death, sleep through nightmare, pain through the body, seeking and losing herself in her own reflected image. "I use my face, my body, as tools to communicate a part of life, endless memories, gestures, unspoken words." Hers is an autobiographical work that is imprinted on stoneware slabs hung on walls made with the artist's experimental fireprinting® technique, patented by the artist, where the fusion of clay and photography is accomplished through the sublimation of fire. The result is a work distant from photography and ceramics and not immediately identifiable. Over the years, her investigation has been enriched by other experiments as in "The White Meal", a fragmentary work whereby joining all the tiles together as in a mosaic, a body is recomposed, an image without narrative and identity. In 2015 she won the 59th Faenza Prize with Interior 8 La fleur coupée, a work composed of infinite stoneware tiles.