My artwork contemplates how a thing comes into being and is real-ized. Like an excavated cluster of organic debris, bones, and earth crust, my art finds an active place between the record of a thing and the thing itself. In observing natural forces, I draw from structures intrinsic in nature, which present orderliness and equilibrium. Pondering on transience and dissolution of all things, I create through experimental and improvised means of decomposition and composition, destruction and construction.
Circling a variety of visual poetic languages, my artworks take the form of wall and floor sculptures, paintings, collages, ceramics, photographs, and installations. In creating, I’m interested in the moment of insight that happens when something can’t be known or understood but is perceived as sensation, feeling, and imagination. I’m fascinated by the act of looking and how it can reveal its internal-external paradox between experiencing and the naming of it, between sensory input and cognition.
The recurring themes may include origin, being and time, the self and the other, fragment and whole, impermanence and permanence.
Marcela Gottardo (b. 1982, Brazil) is a Brazilian-Italian artist whose practice explores philosophical questions surrounding time, being, duality, wholeness, and fragmentation. Her multidisciplinary work spans sculpture, ceramics, painting, and installation, often engaging organic forms and elemental materials as a way to reflect on transformation and discovery.
She lived for twelve years in Los Angeles, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting (2012) and a Master of Fine Arts (2014) at Otis College of Art and Design. Gottardo now lives and works in Pistoia, Italy, continuing to develop a body of work that balances material experimentation with philosophical inquiry, inviting viewers into spaces of perception, becoming, and renewal.