Ceramicist Laura De Benedetti on finding hope after tragedy
Through her work, the artist has paid tribute to her ancestors and the countless women who were left widowed after the two World Wars.
BY GABY WINE. from JC - Jewish Chronicle. JULY 20, 2023.
Laura De Benedetti with her collection of figurines
The lawn in ceramicist Laura De Benedetti’s Finchley garden is adorned with unusual three-dimensional shapes in varying shades of blue. These aren’t exotic flowers, but porcelain sculptures of what De Benedetti calls her “grandmothers”. Unlike traditional figurines, De Benedetti’s are abstract, and it takes some scrutiny to make out an eye here or a mouth there. Moreover, each one of them is unique, a consequence of the artist’s spontaneous way of working.
“I firstly create a bowl and then I turn it upside down and shake it. Each bowl moves in a different way.”
After modelling the bowl into the base, De Benedetti then takes leftover fragments from cups, bowls or jugs and uses them to fashion parts of the body or face or pieces of clothing.
“It started when I was making a functional piece. A scrap came off and I thought: ‘This looks like a face, so I’ll make a body to go with it.’ The first one represented my grandmother.”
Since creating her first figurine, De Benedetti has produced around 200 more, all glazed in the blues of the Mediterranean Sea, “which I would walk along as a child” while living in Genoa, north-west Italy.
As well as paying tribute to her ancestors, the sculptures represent the many women who were left widowed after the two World Wars, she says. “When I was growing up, my parents would look after some old ladies. I wanted these ladies to be remembered because they didn’t get to have their own children or grandchildren.”
Starting her career in pharmacology, De Benedetti discovered she had a gift for ceramics in the early nineties. She perfected her technique of “throwing” a ball of clay by adapting an age-old Italian tradition of sending wedding guests home with a handful of sugared almonds. “For my wedding, I made 200 little bowls for the almonds and painted each one.”
The member of New North London Synagogue says that her Jewish identity “completely impacts” her work. She recalls making a chanukiah out of clay as a child and the spirals she incorporates into her designs are inspired by “the spiral-shaped columns in the synagogue I grew up in”.
When the Nazis invaded Italy, both her mother, who was from Turin and her father, who was also from Turin, but grew up in Genoa, were hidden by non-Jews during the Holocaust.
“A lot of Italian Jews were saved by the local population, who risked their own lives in doing so.” De Benedetti is still in touch with one of the descendants of the family who hid her mother.
Moving to London in 1996, De Benedetti went on to take a degree in ceramics and has been working and exhibiting her creations for the past 16 years. The mum of four belongs to East Finchley Open Artists.
Recently, De Benedetti began sculpting faces in response to the death of her father at the end of 2021. “Just doing that gave me a sense of healing.”
She now has a collection of around 100 faces and her hope is to show them in an exhibition as a way of commemorating “all those people who saved Jews like my family in the Holocaust”.
Inspired by immersive exhibitions which “you can feel on your skin”, De Benedetti says: “I want people to go into a dark room, where they will be able to choose a face they want to rescue, carry it into a sunlit room and place it alongside other faces. Loneliness can be a dark and cold place, so I want to emphasise the human need for community.”
Through her art, De Benedetti aims to inspire hope after tragedy.
“My family’s story is not so sad. After the war, they were able to go home, and life returned in full flow. My work symbolises coming out of something sad into something light.”
