Francesca Ferreri on Ceramics, Memory, and Restoration

Francesca Ferreri (b. 1981, Savigliano) has adopted ceramics as her primary artistic language, focusing on memory and fragments. Trained as a fresco restorer and briefly in animation at Enarmonia in Turin, she now works in Ghent, Belgium, where she is in residency at HISK. Ferreri uses found ceramic fragments—from household accidents, flea markets, or her own production—as 'activators' to reconstruct imagined pasts and futures, deliberately avoiding philological restoration. Her work often combines ceramics with plaster, pigments, and consolidating resins. She fires ceramics at the Academy of Anderlecht in Brussels and fabricates larger pieces at HISK's wood and metal workshop. Ferreri cites her residency at CARS (curated by Lorenza Boisi) as pivotal, where she began incorporating decorative painting and consumer objects. She has exhibited at MARS, KASK, and MHKA in Antwerp. Her series 'Eterocronie' and 'Le origini della geometria' demonstrate her evolving material choices. Ferreri values ceramics for their surface possibilities and clear reference to restoration. She continues to collaborate with Italian specialists for materials like marble dust and consolidating resins.