Renata Cassiano Alvarez
My practice is deeply informed by my family and my context as a Latin American. Both my parents are archeologists who dedicated their lives to deciphering the remnants of our past. Through this lens, I see the object as survival - objects with a sense of permanence and timelessness. My life has been filled with artifacts from my ancestors, belonging to religious and life rituals, and they are present in my making through form. Ceramics to me, embodies the natural vulnerability that exists within all of us, and the tension between ephemerality and endurance.
My work is a space for me to explore ideas and experiences around language. As a transnational artist, the ability to move from one language to another is crucial and illuminates the centrality of change within the human experience. My sculptures are the artifacts from the constant ritual of transformation, visceral witnesses of what happens within. I excavate and interpret them, looking to give meaning to it all.
The engagement with craft is vital within my practice. I believe craft is the pursuit of an intimate relationship with material which allows for the grounding of self to our own existence through our actions.
Renata Cassiano Alvarez is a Mexican-Italian artist born in Mexico City and currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Arkansas School of Art. Cassiano Alvarez works predominantly in the medium of clay, in a search for developing an intimate collaborative relationship with material and material language. Influenced by archeology and history, she is interested in the power of the object as survival - objects with a sense of permanence and timelessness, and language as transformation; specially how adopting a different language can affect the physicality of the human body, and how this translates into material. Educated in Mexico, Italy, Denmark and the US, she has had the opportunity to work in different artistic environments, a cross-cultural and multimedia experience which has lead to the belief that craft is an evolving field and something that exists in motion. Her work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in public and private collections in Mexico, Estonia, Italy, Taiwan, Germany, Denmark, Latvia, China, USA and Slovenia. She works between her studio in Veracruz, Mexico and Fayetteville, Arkansas.
