“Call and gather. Sisters. Moths and flame twisters. Lioness bones, snakes and stones.” is a solo exhibition by Chiara Camoni: an imaginary landscape to immerse and lose yourself in.
The largest body of work ever presented by the Italian artist, combining new productions, conceived and created especially for the exhibition, with historical works. A reflection on the feminine, the spiritual and mystical sphere of reality, the relationship between culture and history, and the everyday gestures that shape our existence.
A practice that interweaves spirituality and craft using multiple forms of expression, from drawing to vegetable printing, from video to sculpture and ceramics.
The practice of Chiara Camoni (Piacenza, 1974; lives and works in Seravezza, Italy) ranges from drawing to sculpture and installation, with a focus on ceramics. Her work is characterized by the use of household objects or organic elements that the artist integrates into her production. Herbs, berries and flowers, as well as different types of clay and ashes, determine the distinctive natural tones of her works, recalling the earth and vegetation that Camoni collects and incorporates into her sculptures. The works are then reassembled through ritual actions that have a strong connection to the ancestral and archaic worlds and aim to explore the relationship between craft and spirituality. Community and exchange are also important: the artist often collaborates with friends and relatives in workshops and seminars to create her works. Camoni’s language adapts techniques and materials from everyday life, such as ceramics, printmaking or loom weaving, mainly from the toolkit of traditional women’s activities. In doing so, she adopts communal approaches similar to the practices of other historical Italian artists, such as Maria Lai (1919-2013) or the processual trajectories of Laura Grisi (1939-2017).
The exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca, “Call and gather. Sisters. Moths and flame twisters. Lioness bones, snakes and stones.“, curated by Lucia Aspesi and Fiammetta Griccioli, brings together the largest body of work ever presented in Italy by Chiara Camoni. With a series of new productions, it creates an architecture of collectivity and memory, whose forms are inspired by the Italian gardens of the late Renaissance and archeological sites. The symmetrical and radial design of the floor plan creates corridors and rooms, paths and environments that divide the space into several areas, in which visitors can linger or converse. The empty center is the nucleus around which the exhibition project revolves: the works are arranged as if on the bleachers of an arena, transforming the exhibition into a gathering or a performance. At the same time, the environment is designed as a physical landscape in which the boundaries between architecture, sculpture, and objects become blurred and ambiguous. While through the windows, opened for the occasion along the walls of the Shed, natural daylight gives way to dusk. This cyclical pattern is a creative and vital force, with its rhythmic sequence of moments of stillness and darkness and others animated by reflections and sunlight.
The title of the exhibition is formulated as a poetic composition or a spell. On the one hand, it echoes an incantation that invites the public to delve into an archaic and mysterious dimension; on the other hand, it condenses and anticipates some of the elements and images in Chiara Camoni’s practice, conjured by the artist’s own words. It is precisely on the basis of this idea of collective memory that the largest series of Sisters, which the artist has been working on since 2019, has been collected and exhibited. These anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sculptures are formed by an accumulation of different materials, from polychrome terracotta to wax, from stoneware and porcelain to vegetable elements and iron, plastic and found objects. For Camoni, they look like figures from the unconscious, primordial deities embodying an ancestral femininity. Their physical and material appearance is capable of evoking a sense of awe and wonder in the viewer, as if each one of them concealed a narrative that is at once intimate and mythical. Their presence conveys a message of sisterhood that encourages the desire for unity and community, and the assertion of identity. Chiara Camoni explains:
“As a woman artist, my identity is formed archaeologically, in a distant time and space, to which I always return to find my place in the present. This is how the works are born, and, with an autonomous life, they move in the time and space that comes later, in the future. This is the beginning of the duality that makes them mutable, ambiguous and prone to change.”
The works exhibited at Pirelli HangarBicocca seem to belong to an imaginary past that is gradually unraveling, like an archaeological site where stories and objects overlap in time, transforming the memories of a place. An example of this is Floor (for Clarice 02) (2022), composed of glazed stoneware tiles with ash, earth and sand. An homage to the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920–77), it describes the passage of matter—and decoration—from one state to another. In contrast, the series of Butterfly Vases (2020-23), displayed on wooden tables, reinterprets the canopic jars of ancient Egypt, which preserved the sacred organs of the pharaohs. These works contain fresh or dried flowers that are sculptural elements in their own right, albeit in constant transformation, and their forms, which resemble those of animals, insects, and coral, link sculpture to the world of ritual objects. The two new works, presented at the entrance and exit, open and close the exhibition in both directions. At the entryway, the visitor is welcomed by Lionesses (2024), two sculptural architectures in Lecce stone containing the remains of shells and animal bones, while at the end of the path we find the sculptural group Dogs (Bruno and Tre) (2024), two aluminum statues lying on a carpet: the figures represent a threshold, warning, and protection.
The relationship with the natural and animal world is central to Chiara Camoni’s work and is evident in the construction of the exhibition space, which is designed to resemble a garden or a walk in the woods, where even natural light and shadow reveal and conceal a metaphysical landscape. Zoomorphic figures, carpets woven from plants, and vegetal prints influence the visitor’s experience and movement, such as the new series The Three Snakes, (2024) and Serpenti e Serpentesse (2024), created for this exhibition. These sculptures consist of assemblages of onyx scales or porcelain elements that, when placed on the floor, obstruct, and constrain the audience’s passage into certain areas of the space. Meanwhile, the idea of home as shelter and protection is evoked by the presence of various tents and hanging drapes. These are installations composed of vegetable prints on fabric, often made during workshops organized by the artist. They are obtained by pressing plants and flowers directly onto silk or cotton, and their colored traces create abstract or anthropomorphic patterns. Camoni manipulates and reworks natural elements to highlight the deep connections we can establish with them, but also the infinite possibilities of transformation and metamorphosis of matter that reveal the deep meaning of existence.
Curated by
Lucia Aspesi and Fiammetta Griccioli
at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
until July 21, 2024