The Clay Studio : Shop

As a first-generation Italian American, my work searches for interactions with an old world while finding a foothold within the new diaspora. As time moves forward and members of that world slowly start to pass on, I question how my interaction with the past changes as each new year leaves me with less resources to lean on, fewer stories to hear, and more questions left unanswered about my native heritage. My work aims to preserve my unknown ancestors and those I have lost, while I insist on keeping the culture of a dying town relevant in my modern life. Exploring the connections between utilitarian and domestic forms as tessellating patterns, I reinterpret traditional vessels and architecture as portals into the past. The portals act as lenses to contextualize my own first-generation identity in relationship to America's immigration history, the generational effects of trauma, and the cycle of life, death and rebirth through repeated patterns. The chain that locks the front gate in America exists in the crocheted curtain at the farmhouse in Italy; the terracotta roof tiles on that house, made by repeatedly draping clay over one’s thigh links the body’s natural form to a permanent pattern in the built environment. These undying patterns shared across continents become physical manifestations of ancestry, emblematic of a deteriorating world so far away from my own. Reimagining these objects and crafts as windows to another era I find comfort in continuance despite grief and loss, solidifying my impermanent existence within a larger, ever-changing lineage.

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Sonia Kilcoyne

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Sonia Kilcoyne

Did you Know?

Can We Help?

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