About
Working across sculpture, painting, photography, light, and performance, she draws from personal experiences, ancestral histories, and material experimentation to explore how we understand and interpret the world.
Her work moves between art, science, philosophy, and spiritual traditions, questioning established systems of knowledge and the boundaries between physical reality and human consciousness.
Materials are central to her investigations. Historical ceramic molds become instruments of transformation; clay and earth carry geological and cultural histories; light functions as both a physical phenomenon and a means of exploring perception. Through these processes, Pietrobon examines how matter can preserve traces of experience, embody inherited knowledge, and acquire new meanings.
Moving between the personal and the collective, her practice considers how our understanding of reality is shaped by history, culture, biology, and belief—and how these inherited interpretations might be reconsidered.
Places & Lineages
Texts
The Space Between the Visible and Invisible
2026I am interested in the space between what can be seen and what can only be sensed.
A face is visible. A body is visible. Clay, soil, landscape, an architectural structure, a ceramic mold: these are things we can touch and measure. But each carries something that cannot be seen so easily—memory, ancestry, absence, belief, consciousness, inherited knowledge, the history of the hands that came before us.
My work begins in this space.
I move between painting, sculpture, ceramics, light, photography, sound, and performance because no single material seems capable of holding all of it. Sometimes the material itself becomes a form of evidence. Clay contains geological time. An industrial mold carries the memory of repetition and labor. A portrait preserves a body that will disappear. Light makes an object visible while remaining immaterial itself.
I am drawn to things that retain traces: a mold that has survived after the object it once produced has disappeared; soil taken from a landscape; the face of a family member; a gesture repeated across generations. I think of these not simply as materials or images, but as vessels.
This is also why excavation recurs in my work. I am less interested in inventing something entirely new than in uncovering what is already present but difficult to see. At times this excavation is literal: clay, sand, fragments, layers of paint. At other times it is psychological or historical. I return to family histories, places, rituals, landscapes, and inherited forms and ask what remains inside them.
The work does not attempt to prove that the invisible exists. It begins with the possibility that what we cannot see may nevertheless leave a material trace.
I am interested in finding that trace.
On Inheritance and the Mold
2019–ongoingI arrived in Nove, in northern Italy, carrying a history I understood only partially.
My family had been connected to ceramics, lighting, and manufacturing for generations. My grandfather was a ceramicist, and my grandmother, Bertilla, worked in fashion in Breganze. They emigrated from Italy to Canada in the 1950s and started a lighting company in the basement of their home. It eventually grew into a factory employing more than one hundred people.
My grandfather focused on sculpting lamps and producing ceramics, while my grandmother oversaw lampshade production. My father later joined the company and managed the business side. I grew up spending many weekends in the factory, surrounded by their work. By the time I returned to Veneto, this history existed for me somewhere between family story and material fact.
Then I encountered the molds.
They were functional objects, made to reproduce other objects. They belonged to a system of production in which repetition was the objective: one form could produce another, and another, and another.
But once removed from production, a mold becomes something else.
I began to see the molds as a kind of negative memory. They contained the shape of something absent. Their cavities described objects that were no longer there.
Break the Mold began with nineteen historical ceramic molds, but the project gradually became less about preserving them than about asking what inheritance means.
What are we supposed to do with what we receive?
Preserve it exactly as it was? Reject it? Repeat it? Transform it?
I began pouring the molds, distorting, breaking down, cutting, iand rebuilding the forms into something new. The focus was on destruction, balance and fragility. Objects that once belonged to production became sculptures, lamps, vessels, and structures. Repetition produced difference.
As the project developed, I began naming new families of objects. Berta, a series of lampshades, takes its name from my grandmother Bertilla. The shades return to something she once made, but through another generation, another hand, and another language of form.
Other works became Merzsters. Their development began after spending time with Scarlett Rouge and attending Rick Owens fashion shows and events in Paris. There was a freedom in that world that stayed with me. When I returned to the studio in Italy, I found myself treating the inherited forms differently—distorting them, disrupting them, tearing them open more radically than I had before. The name Merzsters partly references Owens’s Monsters, carrying that sense of disruption and freedom into the work, while Merz connects the pieces to another artistic lineage.
In these ruptured forms I also began to recognize an affinity with Marisa Merz’s metal sculptures: the way a material associated with strength and rigidity could become intimate, organic, almost soft. The connection was not about reproducing her forms, but about a shared contradiction I was drawn to—hardness behaving as though it were pliable.
Space was equally important. After working in architecture in New York for many years, I rarely think of an object independently from the space surrounding it. Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau has long interested me for this reason: sculpture overtaking the architecture of a home until the distinction between object and environment begins to disappear.
I began imagining Break the Mold in a similar way—not as a collection of individual ceramic objects, but as forms capable of entering and altering a space. In their raw white bisque, placed against the white walls of a domestic interior, the pieces can seem to emerge from the architecture itself. The mold is no longer simply an object within the room; the room becomes part of the work.
These references are not inherited in the same way as my family's molds or my grandmother's lampshades. They belong to another kind of lineage: one assembled through looking, learning, affinity, and admiration.
I have come to think of inheritance in this expanded sense. There are the histories we are born into, and there are the histories we choose to enter. Both can become material.
This question has since moved beyond the molds themselves. It appears in portraits of family members, in landscapes, in clay and soil, in architecture, and in my interest in biological and cultural inheritance.
We inherit more than objects. We inherit gestures, knowledge, stories, silences, beliefs, ways of working, ways of seeing. We also encounter forms, artists, places, and ideas that become part of us later.
Some inheritances are given. Others are chosen. Others arrive before we have language for them.
Perhaps making is one way of deciding what to carry forward—and what to transform.
Groundwork and Currents: Matter as Memory
2026For a long time I painted the landscape.
Eventually, painting it was not enough.
I wanted the landscape to enter the painting. Two places I spend time, I wanted to transport people to those lands.
In Groundwork, clay and sand are mixed into and layered beneath oil paint.
In Currents, I work with sand and seaweed to create beach landscapes from Venice.
The earth is no longer represented only through color or image; matter becomes part of the surface itself.
This distinction interests me.
A painted landscape points toward a place. A fragment of earth has already belonged to one.
Clay carries pressure, mineral composition, water, heat, extraction, labor, and time. It can become a brick, a vessel, a sculpture, a building. Before any of these things, it is ground.
My work with ceramics taught me to understand clay as something that records. It registers pressure immediately: a fingerprint, a tool, a mold, the weight of another material. Once fired, something momentary can become permanent.
Painting behaves differently. An image can conceal what came before it. One layer covers another. A figure disappears beneath a landscape. A landscape dissolves into abstraction. Something can remain physically present while becoming visually inaccessible.
I am interested in bringing these two conditions together.
The paintings become accumulations rather than windows: soil, image, gesture, memory, erasure.
The ground is no longer simply beneath the image.
It becomes part of what the image remembers.
Between Grey and Color
2026For a long time, I was drawn to grey.
In my early portraits, particularly the Grey Period, color was deliberately restrained. I was painting older members of my family, and grey allowed me to concentrate on the face: skin, age, expression, presence. Removing color seemed to remove something extraneous. The paintings became quieter, almost archaeological. I was interested in what remained when color receded.
Over time, color returned to my work.
But I don't think I use color to describe the world as it appears. Increasingly, I use it to describe how something is experienced or remembered.
A landscape may begin with an observed place—a field, water, a particular sky—but the colors shift as I paint. Greens become acidic. Water becomes violet. A horizon might turn orange or red. The painting moves away from documentation and toward another kind of accuracy.
Memory does something similar. We remember a place, but not precisely. Certain details disappear while others become exaggerated. A color may become more vivid than it ever was in reality. What remains is not an objective record but an accumulation of perception, emotion, time, and association.
This is where grey and color meet in my work.
Grey is not an absence of color. It contains color. A grey can move toward violet, green, blue, brown. It changes according to what surrounds it. I am interested in that instability—the moment when something that initially appears neutral begins to reveal another register underneath.
The same is true of the brighter colors I use. I am drawn to ultramarine, red, orange, yellow, violet, and particular greens not simply for their intensity, but because they can interrupt the expected reading of an image. Color can separate a painting from the visible world while making another experience of that world more present.
Sometimes color arrives through material itself: clay, soil, ceramic glaze, gold, fabric. At other times it is painted onto or over something already present. A portrait can disappear beneath a field of color while continuing to exist underneath it. The image is obscured but not erased.
I think this relationship—between what is present and what can be perceived—is central to my work.
Grey can conceal color. Color can conceal an image. A landscape can conceal a memory. A surface can conceal another surface.
Painting allows all of these things to remain present at once.
Perhaps this is why I continue moving between greyness and intense color. I don't experience them as opposites. They are different ways of approaching the same question: how do you paint something that is there, but cannot be seen exactly as it is?