The year I turned thirty-four, fate decided to give me a wonderful gift. It was that leap year, so hot that the soles of my sandals stuck to the asphalt.
It was the year I married my Italian husband and I came to live in a small town in the hills of Romagna in the Northeast of Italy. I made friends with the old women of the town, to my surprise, they were very curious and uninhibited for their age. They wanted to know everything about me, but actually, it was I who discovered many of their secrets.
Immediately after the Second World War, a period of poverty and economic difficulty, these women, who were young at the time, had to solve their economic problems at home. The most daring made embroidery and lace, which they took to sell in the nearest important city, Florence. Some women in the village specialized in a fabric called “merletto”, a wonderful transparent weave worked with needle, bobbins or crochet, sewing, knotting and intertwining silk or cotton threads.
The discovery of this lace had an enormous fascination for me, for its subtlety, for its transparencies, for the harmony between full and empty spaces, for its almost mythical evocative power, for being a symbol of elegance and grace.
Taking this little train from the village to the city, for an hour, was for these women an act of great freedom and great imprudence for the social environment in which they lived. For many of them it meant an adventure, just as it is for us today to take a rocket to the moon.
Some of them felt strengthened by the new vision of life, by the new opportunities for work, for study, despite challenging their domestic and social surroundings.
Each of them told me stories that happened on the train, that happened in Florence, they told me of people with whom they had formed definitive relationships, some dangerous and others positive, they told me of things they had done that they could not have done in their hometown and that changed their lives.
While telling the stories their eyes shone, some laughed, some cried. I felt lucky and complicit. I felt like I was talking to myself in the future. As a result of these trips, some decided to stay and study without the consent of their family, another discovered she had a voice and was good at business, another found love, lived with difficulty and in secret. In the village they called them “the indecent ones”. I will keep their secrets hidden out of respect for them, some of these old women are no longer with us.
Here begins my ethnographic research, here begins my collection of old pieces of laces, each with a story. Memories deposited in a porcelain boat that recalls an intimate female form. Fragments of “merletti” or laces scanned and printed inside the boats using porcelain inks fired at high temperatures.
The first collection of INDECENT LACES allowed me to receive the First Prize at the International Ceramics Biennial in Andenne, Belgium. And I continue to collect laces and build boats for other voyages.
