Carina Ciscato

Carina Ciscato’s practice in clay, involves, playing and exploring forms, space, and structure. Ciscato’s works owe much to her observations of architecture. She looks for unconventional shapes, altering the usual proportions and sizes, to create pots that intrigue the senses. Her way of working porcelain centres on tearing, cutting, folding, stretching, assembling and pooling the qualities of the material - its strength and fragility. It is thrown with a range of textures to distinguish different surfaces, allowing new relationships to emerge. Carina Ciscato exposes and reveals all the processes. There are no secrets. The quiet muted tones of white and blue grays of her vessels are chosen to emphasize the fluidity and sharpness of the forms, reinforcing the edges, cuts and natural curves.

Her intention is to allow the viewer the opportunity to explore an object, its shapes, its forms and composition, discovering a hidden beauty, beyond function and predictability. Her work questions space and volume, function and purpose, balance and fragility, in a search for a purer aesthetic. Her creations allow for new meanings, new observations, new ways of seeing and perceiving, rendering the object redefined and reinvented forever.

Carina Ciscato was born in Sao Paulo Brazil. After studying Industrial Design there, she was introduced to Studio Pottery in Krefeld Germany and subsequently spent a year working in the studio of ceramicist Marietta Cremer. Once back in Brazil, she became an apprentice to Lucia Ramenzoni, one of Sao Paulo’s leading potters. Following her 6 year apprenticeship and a number of courses in the USA, Carina Ciscato started to sell her work in local galleries and through museum shops.

In 1999 she moved to London, where she became an assistant in the studio of Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal. This move from Brazil to the UK and the change in culture and attitudes to ceramics led her in exciting new directions. Carina Ciscato has been based in Vanguard Court, London, since 2003.

Constructed Pots By Carina Ciscato

At Future Heritage

Carina Ciscato used Future Heritage to launch her colour porcelain series. In the previous year she had begun to experiment and explore using colour and textures in porcelain. She developed a new matt palette, muted tones inspired by Brazilian architecture. Alongside the white shiny porcelain, she had previously used, she created a graded range of blues/greens/greys that interact and bounce off each other in a mannered stillness. The work was quiet and grounded like buildings in a humid, rainy metropolis.

“Future Heritage opened new doors and helped me make new contacts not only with the public but with other makers and exhibitors, nationwide and internationally. One of the most direct outcomes was that I supplied a range of work to a new showroom that opened in Silicon Valley - Trunk flooring and Porthbathroom." - Carina Ciscato

Current work

Carina Ciscato has been working on a new series ‘Polana’ (referring to a stud farm near São Paulo,) which incorporates colour. The work is still constructed but the sets are more functional, based on tableware rather than decorative objects. The individual items can be used separately or stacked into a single object, an idea that she has re-visited after many years.

Following a residency in Mashiko Japan in 2017, Carina Ciscato has re-evaluated her own work, based on the knowledge she acquired on traditional Japanese approaches to ceramics - function, forms and ideas. It opened new doors, new insight and ideas on how to explore even further. “I realise that the material has also its own voice and I would like to investigate and learn the different ways of allowing the material to speak, to reach its full potential, to show its hidden beauty.”

She is currently working on wall pieces and some more sculptural vessels to explore shapes and functions. During the epidemic she has been pushing the scale of her work and is prepared pieces for an exhibition called ‘Autoritratto,’ at Joanna Bird gallery.

Series Of Porcelain By Carina Ciscato

If you would like to make an enquiry about Carina Ciscato and commissions, visit her website www.carinaciscato.co.uk