IF I AM IN PIECES IS IT EASIER TO SEE? 

2020

Handmade glazed white ceramic, Approximately 36x36 inches

“In her first week of shelter-in-place, Maria D. Rapicavoli came across a shattered storefront; the piles of the blue-green window glass entranced her, as they were evidence of an unfamiliar neighborhood drama and human interaction. She tried to save the remnants to be repurposed for her Homemade project, but abandoned them for fear of bringing a foreign contaminant inside. However, once indoors, she broke several wine glasses; each accident reminded her of the broken window. She staged photographs with these new shards of glass and continued to write her reflections down. In the final weeks of Homemade, Rapicavoli returned to the broken storefront and recreated the thousands of glass shards that she encountered there out of porcelain. Her rigorous and time-consuming process allowed her to meditate on her own experience of having to reconstruct and reimagine her current reality in this unprecedented moment. Through hours of meticulous molding and modeling of individual clay pieces that occupied every inch of her apartment, Rapicavoli returned to where her project first began, indicating that, as Gabriel García Márquez notes in One Hundred Years of Solitude, time does not pass; rather, it turns in a circle.” text by Chiara Mannarino