A Bezoar is a stone made of remnants, parts that did not follow the normal route within a system. In most cases, it stays unnoticed in the tract or stomach of its host. When bezoars were first extracted from animals or humans, our predecessors were confronted with a dilemma: how to approach this unusual, threatening and at the same time, extraordinary thing.

Bezoars were then attributed magical properties, particularly those of counteracting poison, and soon came to be known as precious antidotes. That which could have caused death was now that which could prevent it.

The most common type of bezoar is the Phytobezoar, which is made up of indigestible materials (such as plants, fibers, peels). When these elements are processed in the stomach, and fail to be integrated in the digestive and nutritional chains, they change and become stone-like formations that stay inside the body. This alteration indirectly transforms them from biofacts into some type of artifacts. 

In this project I explore this connection through bezoars made from reclaimed clays and glazes that are then fired several times, actively altering the different elements they are made of. The kiln, much like the stomach, has a central role in enabling these “mutations”. The end product of these transformations is then placed on a pedestal similar to those upon which the rarest organic bezoars -valuable objects of desire- now stand on in museums around the world. 

Porcelain is a material with memory. This means that no matter how many changes it undergoes, the initial transformations or interventions it is subjected to keep coming back, are indelible. With this thought in mind, the series Wounds is centred on the past as the lingering narrative around which those after are built. By cutting open the spaces where a crack showed up on each of these Wounds once they were dry, the margins between the outside and the inside of the piece are blurred and the options where to look at the object from are expanded. The hollowness of each piece is also exposed this way. The outer layer of this “totems of memory” becomes the skin that covers what is hidden from our eyes and the incisions - or wounds - made on the surface allows us to see the space within.

Imagine an eel soup: a wriggling mass of creatures whose ends and beginnings can be swapped in the human eye, trapped in a limited space, their bodies entangled below the surface or floating on top of it, half submerged in the liquid that now holds them. Like the visible bits of the viscous animals you have just pictured, the objects I present here are fragments of an ephemeral reality. In a collaboration with photographer Federico Clavarino, by carefully observing spaces and body parts as they twist, press, open, close, bend and touch, photography and ceramic have become our means to reinterpret a series of meaningful connections. The resulting series of reconfigurations ultimately tells a story of coexistence, one that is largely built around the lingering images left behind by otherwise vanishing intersections.





5. Shows

Bezoar + Wounds @ Miart with Viasaterna + Federico Clavarino, September 2021






Wounds @ Artissima, November 2020 




Commission of sculptures for Ghost Stories by Federico Clavarino @ Contretype, December 2020




Eel Soup @ Viasaterna, December 2019