Marie-José d'Aprile was born in Switzerland of a Spanish mother and an Italian father and has since her youth lived out her life between the dialectic of a passion for human rights and a love of art, in all its many forms. His artistic core has manifested itself in many different ways throughout her life, whether through writing, theatre or the reinterpretation of furniture and artefacts. "I have always been attracted to ceramics, but maintained a certain distance from the material. Perhaps I did this because I suspected that the moment I sank my hands into clay, I would never go back,' says Marie-José.
However, her passion for ceramics and working with clay came back to her strongly in the second half of the 2000s during a stay in Tunisia, where she was staying for reasons of work. Fascinated by the craftsmanship of the local artisans, experts in age-old manufacturing techniques developed in the Mediterranean at the dawn of human civilisation, Marie-José decided to spend part of her free time attending ceramics classes held by a young Tunisian artist. "I thought it would just be a therapeutic activity, to give balance to my hectic work life, but the fact is it was a for me like a bolt out of the sky and I haven't stopped since," the artist recalls.
Professional life then took her to Rome, where she met Daniela Vacca, with whom she was able to hone her technical skills in ceramics and glazes. It was during those four years spent in the studio of the Roman ceramic artist that it dawned on Marie-José that an important chapter of her life was coming to an end, leaving room for the development of a stirring creative urge. Marie-José feels, working on in ceramics, an organic contact with the primitive essence of the earth, capable of completely suspending her rational and intellectual soul. "In my work, it is the clay that guides me. You have always to be present in what you are doing and creating, achieving a complete oneness with the material," explains the artist. Her manual work allows her to convey emotions through the creation of three-dimensional objects that require the involvement of several senses, as they are the result both of the methodical processing of ideas and concepts, and of momentary and irrational intuitions.
While focussing primarily on terracotta work, to which she has been devoting herself since 2019 in the lakeside studio that is open by appointment for private visits and workshops with the artist on the working of clay, Marie-José has never neglected the multiplicity of languages and expressive possibilities offered by other ceramic techniques and other forms of artistic expressions. Alongside the more traditional processes, Marie-José also works with sophisticated and ancient techniques, such as bucchero of Etruscan origin, and the ancient raku firing technique, which, through the unpredictability of chemical reactions, gives Marie-José's creations a still more fascinating and imperfect appearance, featuring contrasting rough and smooth surfaces, and bright colours and intense shades of black.
Marie-José's works are always tactile and organic, are modelled entirely by hand, and often draw inspiration from the natural elements and the environment that has produced them. "Since I have been living and working in Como, I have been inspired by the foamy white of the waves and the blue of the sky and water, colours that are new to me, but which now often return in my most recent work," explains the artist. Despite her particular preference for ceramics and sculpture, Marie-José has never lost her curiosity for other artistic media, such as painting and photography, which over the years have influenced and pervaded her complicated approach to art. On the occasion of the group exhibition "Seeing oneself in the other through contemporary art" (20-21 January 2023), curated by the Italian-Palestinian photographer Mustafa Sabbagh, Marie-José had the opportunity to make some ceramic works that could enter into a dialogue with photographs documenting the complex creative process behind her works. She also recently took part in the fifth Lake Como Design Festival in the group exhibition 'The Other Animals', inspired by Pliny the Elder's encyclopaedic work, as well as in the exhibition 'Breathing with the World' at the International Women's Biennial in Trieste.