MARTINA TARANTO & FABRIZIA FANTINI
FERTILE MATERIALS THAT PLAY HOST TO LIFE
LifeAutoctona
Italian artist and design Martina Taranto’s work takes inspiration from the human connection to nature. Although many of our Cluster Crafts community take inspiration from the natural world, Taranto literally weaves living matter into her work with seeds that germinate inside the fabric of her sculptures and literally emerge from the material.
LifeAutoctona | Detail
LifeAutoctona | Detail
Taranto believes there are many ways humans need to attempt to better coexist with and care for the environment. Her approach to design is informed by her holistic philosophies and her research focuses to how we can gain a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by the environment.
Her pieces are aimed at provoking behavioural changes and provoke ethical reactions and leaving viewers with a sense of wonder (after perhaps a moment of perplexity).
The collection included in the Cluster Crafts online exhibition and store is named LifeAutoctona and is a set of sculptural elements designed especially for the Cluster platform. The pieces are made of a material invented by Taranto, Viral Nature, which acts as a building material and as a vessel for life.
There are nine pieces that form the entire LifeAutoctona series. The shapes are an interpretation of Ancient Greek columns combined with elements of Arabic style.
“The composition is a formal iteration of the use of Viral Nature, an organic composite material of my invention able to nurture vegetal life; plants seeds are embedded in the material structure and flourish, destroying the shape given by the designer and creating a shape wanted by nature,” says Taranto.
By the end of the lifecycle of the plants, the whole piece returns to the land. The process of living ends up destroying the work. In this way her work has its own cycle of life and death.
LifeAutoctona
Viral Nature is a composite material that can play host to life. It is fertile, easy to shape, and resembles the grey of concrete.
“The material, embedded with plant seeds, can be programmed to hold or kick off the process of vegetal growth,” explains Taranto. “It detains humidity maintaining the seeds sufficiently moist and absorbs water through capillarity. The formula of the composite mix is highly adaptable with elements that are local to a specific geographical zone to avoid potential ecological disruption.”
LifeAutoctona
Just like fingerprints and accidental marks left in sculptures made of clay, Taranto also believes that she leaves a human trace in her work. She rarely uses digital fabrication and never industrial processes, ensuring that her reflects her individual process.
“An element of humanity in a product makes it easier to be comprehended, to create a connection between observer/participant and the message or function of the object becomes more instinctive and natural.
“More than the handmade element, I care about the human element,” she explains. “I think it’s interesting to reflect on how blind industrialisation and mechanised production have brought humans to detach not only from nature, but also from their own manual skills, which is the method through which we experience the world... I guess to feel at ease once again with the power of our hands could help to fix our connection with what lives around us.”
Leonardo’s lost pages
Also from Italy, artist Fabrizia Fantini embarked on a journey into ceramics in over two decades ago.
She experimented with different styles and techniques, building a relationship with the material, and allowing herself to break the rules of clay and contaminate it with other materials while conducting her research.
Leonardo’s lost pages
Leonardo’s lost pages
Her sculptural work is raw and textured. Fantini creates landscapes with which she mimics the undulations of nature. They are at once intimate and abstract, leaving space for the viewer to interpret the work in their own way. The surface of each piece carries the fingerprints and the signs of the manipulations of the maker, so though she attempts to represent nature, she also can’t help but also reproduce herself.
The pieces included in the Cluster Crafts online store are part of a series called “Leonardo’s Lost Pages”, which takes inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codes. The tablets that Fantini has created each refers to the different themes of codes: the aerial perspective, botanical studies, nimbus cloud studies, and portraits.
Iron island | 2019
“Some of them propose at an emotional level a naturalistic landscape represented with the canons of the aerial perspective or a naturalistic landscape of which is possible to catch the rarefied atmosphere, the presence of vegetal elements in the foreground, while the background blurs between barely visible hills and sky,” says Fantini.
Sand island | 2019
Only one of the tablets, named “Woman’s Portrait”, presents a female figure. Her image is subtle, but from the middle of the tablet she seems to survey the landscape.
Work by both artists is available to view and purchase on the Cluster Crafts online exhibition and store.
Thank you for reading,
Katie De Klee & Cluster Team.