Architect Virginia San Fratello Melds Tech and Craft to Create Otherworldly Vessels

Another facet of her oeuvre has been experimenting with machine- and hand-manipulated clay, some of it locally sourced, some from her ancestral Italy. This melding of tech and craft is explored through Emerging Objects, what she calls her “make-tank,” and has resulted in three vessels, all about 1 foot tall, as well as representation by New York gallerist Cristina Grajales.

Bad Ombré is made from 3-D printing a single object from two different clay bodies for a gradient effect. The other two originated from the architect traveling with her 3-D printer (she packs it in a repurposed hard-sided golf bag), particularly when she visited the Italian village of San Fratello and collected 20 pounds of earthenware from a nearby clay-production facility to work with during her C.R.E.T.A Rome residency. At one point, the printer’s X axis was wobbling. “In order to ‘cover up’ the problem, I started twisting elements by hand,” she recalls.

“What I was making in tandem with my newfound collaborator yielded pieces that are impossible to replicate.” Her Uphoria Amphora and Sexy Beast “co-botic” vessels are the result: the loops of the former pinched and shaped by San Fratello, the strands of the latter cut into a shag, then blown dry. “The approach,” she adds, “is probably more representative of what the future of working with robots looks like.”