When I returned to Italy for the Christmas holidays, I had the chance to meet Giuliana Bocconello, potter sculptress, who officially declares that she dedicates herself to works in terracotta and raku.
She started in 1987, when she put her artistic versality at the disposition of boys and adults, beginning to collaborate with different associations. Later, she decided to found her own association, called, not by chance "Earth earth". This will later be for her, and those close to her, a "means" of meeting and confronting contemporary art and, above all, an instrument for deepening the study and the culture of the earth.
At the same time, her passion for the plastic arts is translated into the simple forms so as to appeal to children, the old and the handicapped. She has the support of local and health authorities.
Her creativity is translated into scuplted materials and shown to the public through a series of "rendez-vous and exhibitions.
Her exhibitions are very particular because they are not "static"events where people partecipate passively. No, every exhibition is an occasion for seeling a different dynamic
re-action between the artist and the spectator who, in a certain sense, can become craftsman together with the artist. This particular characteristic has been highlighted above all by Silvia Sfrecola Romani who has repeatedly written and continues to write about Bocconcello. For her, every exhibition or presentation of works of this artist is ."A new walk, a new road to travel: every time that Giuliana Bocconello invites us to view her works she has something new to tell us. Her research goes on, always animated by a fresh and vital sap. There is no hesitation.
This time her reflection is concentrated on pregnancy, not understood as maternity but as fecundation: not women or men, but persons whose stomaches proudly swell with
new lives to be be born. Existence is planning, creating, ideating. So Giuliana investigates pregnancy, seeing it as the symbol of planning under way, authentic and sincere. It is a metaphor of conception which is simply that of understanding, containing, embracing. This is always the centre of her research."
Bocconcello is original in her works, even adopting a language that we might define classical as she always utilizes forms like the square and the circle - symbols respectively of the earth and sky - often fused and regenerated; it is a question of forms that meet, so as to be able to divide into new languages able to animate the earth. This, fused with water and other components, is transformed, once baked, into other regenerated and strengthened material.
This force, the symbology of the message, can be rediscovered in small objects, see the exhibition of "hearts", and in large works, like the monument realised for the Association of Venice and Pontine territory. This last work was perhaps the most demanding for the artist for different reasons.
The first, most important reason, is surely the symbol that this monument should and must represent: the dificult life of all Venetian settlers, called as pioneers to live and, above all, to work the land of the Pontine countryside. This was unhealthy land, marshes, that reclamation schemes had transformed, which persons with the sweat of their brows knew how to draw the strength of their lives, giving shape to a city, a social and economic system, the basis of everyday life.
The land, therefore, was once again for Bocconcello a point of departure, from which to draw expressive force for her work; to mould in all its phases, as did the first Venetian settlers, inhabitants of the Pontine countryside.
This time, however, the encounter with the land represented for the artist a close relationship with the urban scale of the city. There are two aspects to this: the very fact of having to realize a monument for the city, something important, imposing, and the choice to creating a delicate sculpted object to place and contextualise in th heart of Latina, right opposite another historic monument for the city: the posts office of Angiolo Mazzini.
Bocconcello, confronted with this challenge, discovered a new lease of life, a real metamorphosis that led her to open another atelier for different persons, a team of artist craftsmen who shared with her in the genesis of the work.
And with this opening out to other skills, there was also a symbolic "marriage" between her land, obviously transformed into terracotta, fused and harmonized with iron, the supporting soul of this monumental sculpture which thus comes to be called: "a great, harmonious double door ." where the metal structure is surmounted by two slabs of terracotta, with bass reliefs and flanked by coloured embellished clay with symbols of the reclamation, the plough, grain, the sea, etc. So the magic of the past becomes present - we rediscover everything in that moment of going through this double door, and we discover that the intrados is panelled with a curtain of small bricks of terra cotta. On these are engraved the names of the early families of Venetian pioneers present in the Pontine countryside. About a thousand families are named, to whom the monument has been dedicated.
Once again a dynamic sculpted monument. The artist has chosen the monumental form but invited the public, the citizens, to enter, go through the door. To be embraced, as it were, by the warmth of the terracotta, by the strength of the arms of a thousand families.
