Experiences

It was six or seven hours in Enrico Ferrarini's studio in Florence. A single day, between clay and marble. I arrived thinking I would learn a technique and left with another way of looking.

Stone works the opposite way to clay. On the wheel you add: you raise the wall, stretch it, correct upwards. In marble you only take away. Every strike of the chisel is final and there is no putting it back. That impossibility of changing your mind forces you to decide earlier, and to decide less.

Enrico works with a patience I had not seen before. He can spend hours on ten centimetres of surface, looking for the exact point where the light changes. What he taught me that day was less about carving than about waiting: letting the material suggest, rather than imposing an idea brought in from outside.

I came back to the studio with different hands. The stoneware I made afterwards is quieter, with less gesture and more weight. In a single day, the line of the marble stayed in the clay.