Break the Mold
Clay, light, metal
2025
H 120 - 160 cm
Break the Mold 2019 - current
Ceramic, metal, textile, light, and reconfigured industrial materials
The project examines production not as replication, but as a site of variation, memory, and authorship.Break the Mold operates as a sculptural system, treating clay as a site of inquiry rather than craft.
Working from 19 historic molds from a factory in Nove di Bassano, each work emerges through recomposition, generating thousands of unique variations.
Break the Mold functions simultaneously as:
– portrait
– archive
– generative system
A fixed vocabulary of forms produces an evolving sculptural system. Each form originates from discarded molds found in my uncle’s ceramic factory in Nove—one of the last remaining sites of production in the region. Though the factory has since closed, these molds carry the imprint of a local industrial history, many dating to the mid-1980s.
Reused, combined, and reconfigured, they generate a field of unique works. Each form is named after nearby towns, grounding the system within its geographic and cultural origin.
The system begins with a finite set of forms, from which an expansive field of works emerges.
Break the Mold (installation view), 2025
Break the Mold extends from object to system—becoming architecture.
Proposed installation: a modular system in which sculptural elements accumulate into architecture.
Color iterations: surface variation introduces difference within a fixed structural vocabulary.