Mary Di Iorio
Mary Di Iorio is a visual artist, researcher, and author. Her poetic practice merges ceramics, sound, animation, and cataloging, crossing boundaries between object and performance, manual gesture and conceptual reflection. After 23 years in academia, she now dedicates herself fully to her artistic production, which has earned international recognition. She is the author of Ceramic Art in Brazil: Bibliographic Systematization. Her work affirms slowness, embodiment, and memory as radical forms of resistance.
Mary Di Iorio — Work in Progress
With the accelerated growth of technology and its many questions, amid so much unrest, we’ve had to find alternative ways of living and working. Since the Internet was already part of my creative process, it gave me courage for a deeper transformation and more radical transgression in ceramics. Now, I want to animate it, transgress it, give it movement — physical, visible movement. I want to ensure its visibility so it can be exhibited online, through a new and undefined experience. This makes me even more excited.
My greatest motivation is breaking away from the rigid outcome of fired clay — when ceramics become inflexible — and moving it in playful ways, inspired by creation and audacity, crossings, contacts, and friction throughout the creative process. I seek to annul the initial function of forms and create other shapes — or another shape — with a time of their own.
It’s a process of construction between ceramics and other media, blending image references and fictional entanglements of memory — where sound confirms the work. These pieces should be displayed in looping sequence and with sound turned up, because sound ultimately affirms their movement. It’s very important to observe the movement that accompanies each animated piece.
The development of the animations, beyond the physical presence of the work, constantly seeks to reinterpret and transcend the form — or forms — within themselves, offering a new perception to the viewer at every instant. Simple as that. Thinking more and more. Writing and drawing too. Mary
Mary, your “Trama” series elegantly weaves together fragility and resilience, material and void. How do you conceptualize this dialectic tension in your practice, and what does it reveal about your understanding of memory and materiality in contemporary Brazilian identity?
The Trama series is born from the gesture of uniting fragments — material, symbolic, and historical — to form a poetic body that speaks of both delicacy and resistance. The tension between fragility and resilience emerges in the process itself: the use of ceramics, threads, wire, and open structures articulates fullness and emptiness, visibility and absence, what is woven and what breaks.
This dialectic is deeply tied to memory — not as a static archive, but as something that pulses between what remains and what is lost. In the context of contemporary Brazilian identity, this oscillation between materiality and absence reveals layers of a history made of ruptures, erasures, and reinventions. Fragility is not weakness, but a power that holds the capacity for listening, rebuilding, and enduring over time.
My practice seeks to excavate these layers through minimal, almost silent gestures, to highlight how much body, territory, and affection reside in the intervals of matter.
Your work often straddles the boundary between functional craft and conceptual art. How has your academic research into the history of ceramics in Brazil informed your desire to “nullify the original function” of ceramic forms?
Yes, my work deliberately moves through this boundary. Academic research on the history of ceramics in Brazil helped me understand how utilitarian ceramic use — tied to functionality, everyday life, and even popular tradition — was often what ensured the survival of the technique, but also what kept it on the margins of the art system.
Immersing myself in that history, I realized how ceramic forms are laden with expectations of use: containers, utensils, objects for the body or the home. What was once seen as utilitarian gradually gained form, experimentation, and diverse narratives. Throughout human history, artists engaging with clay have explored its expressive and representative potential in culturally specific ways. With my deep and intrinsic relationship with clay, I sought not just my own language but my expressiveness through the material. By nullifying the clay’s utility, I express my presence in the relationship between hand gesture and clay memory — turning its function into more than a symbolic gesture, reshaping perception, provoking other senses, liberating the object from its functional destiny, and offering new experiences in relation to clay.
This gesture is not a rejection of craft — quite the opposite: it’s a recognition of its ancestral power. But it is also an invitation to rupture, to suspend utility as an aesthetic criterion. In that suspended space, ceramics can become memory, silence, emptiness, a fragmented body — something that evokes the sensitive, and not just the practical.
In the work-in-progress CATHEDRA, the chair’s original function is deliberately annulled. It becomes a symbol, part of a choreography, a design object, a provocation about where we sit — not just physically, but emotionally, socially, and spiritually. CATHEDRA is not merely a sculpture: it is a space, a question.
From Eva Hesse’s spatial minimalism to Lygia Clark’s sensorial experiments, your work enters a dialogue with major female avant-garde figures. How do you position your oeuvre within this lineage, and where does it diverge?
There’s a natural affinity with artists who explored the body, material, and space as extensions of internal states. What connects me to Eva Hesse is the presence of the organic, what pulses between structure and instability. With Lygia Clark, I’m moved by the desire to de-hierarchize art, to bring it closer to direct, sensory, almost intimate experience.
I see myself in that lineage not by repeating gestures, but by sharing an impulse: to seek forms that do not impose, but suggest. My practice also begins with the body, with absences, with its layered memories, fragments, suspensions, and intervals.
Perhaps what distinguishes my trajectory is this relationship with ceramics — an ancestral material, marked by domesticity and the earth, but here summoned into other forms of presence: fragile, dispersed, spectral. There’s a dimension of time in my work that resides not only in gesture, but also in what dissolves.
Eva Hesse explored contradictions, creating sculptures that are simultaneously hard and soft, precise and irregular — even incorporating music into her work.
In my practice, I also explore innovative instrumental timbres through a succession of sounds — sometimes soft, sometimes loud and disjointed — affirming the work. I feel my art carries a psychological intensity, akin to Hesse’s, that opens possibilities across other artistic domains. Lygia Clark worked with ceramics in some early pieces.
In your animations and mixed media installations, sound is not a background element but a vital structural presence. Can you elaborate on the role of sound in extending the dimensionality of your ceramic works?
Sound, in my mixed media animations, doesn’t act as an illustrative background. It is a structural layer — almost an invisible architecture — that supports the temporal quality of the piece. When working with ceramics — a solid, ancestral material tied to gesture and permanence — I feel the urge to open it to time and air. Sound does that.
Often, these are minimal sounds: impacts, friction, subtle noises of matter in contact with space. They prolong the hand’s gesture, creating an extension of the body that molds and simultaneously listens. Sound reveals cracks, draws silence closer, and tensions the space between forms.
In this sense, it not only expands the scope of the work, but makes it inhabitable — as if one could enter it through the ears, not just the eyes.
“The Time of the Spinning Tops” suggests a layered metaphor of memory, rotation, perhaps childhood. Could you speak about the philosophical and material inquiries behind this ongoing project and its relation to temporality?
Tempo dos Piões (Spinning Top Time) begins with the image of circular motion as a metaphor for time — time that moves forward in a straight line, yet spins, returns, hesitates. The spinning top — an old, simple, nearly archaic toy — carries the power of repetition and disappearance: spinning intensely until it abruptly stops. It’s time concentrated and undone.
In this project, the gesture of crafting and spinning ceramic tops involves both body and material. The rotation becomes a way of inscribing memory into clay, into sound, into video. These are works that deal with waiting, with the time of the hand, of fire, and of the gaze.
Childhood emerges not as a theme, but as a sensitive layer: one that records time in a more emotional and unstable way. Tempo dos Piões is, in this sense, an experiment on how time can be embodied — not as chronology, but as presence.
As a foundational figure in Brazilian art education, particularly through your work at the Federal University of Uberlândia, how do you see the role of pedagogy as an extension of your artistic practice?
I see pedagogy as an organic extension of my artistic practice. At the university, the studio expands: it becomes a collective space for listening, exchange, and experimentation. The classroom isn’t merely a place for transmitting knowledge, but for building it together — a space where we also learn to question, to deconstruct, to relearn gestures.
Just like with ceramics, pedagogy requires presence, time, and care. It’s made of layers, failures and successes — and of silence. Many times, my teaching practice leads me to observe issues that later return to the studio in material form. There is a constant feedback loop.
Training artists isn’t just about teaching techniques — it’s about activating perception, opening questions, and sustaining processes. In this way, teaching is also a form of modeling: shaping form within time, connection, and attentive listening.
In an age of hyper-acceleration and digital dematerialization, your tactile, process-based approach feels almost radical. How do you see ceramics and, by extension, slowness as a form of resistance in today’s art world?
Ceramics, to me, is a language of time. In an increasingly fast and immaterial world, choosing a process that demands waiting, listening, and presence is a political act. Slowness is not unproductive — it is fertile, dense, transformative. It allows matter to reveal its layers, for gesture to be conscious, for error to become part of the path.
Contemporary art often operates under the logic of acceleration and obsolescence. In this context, working with clay, with fire, with fragments is a way of affirming the body’s permanence in the process. It’s a refusal to rush as a measure of value. Slowness allows me to build works that breathe over time, that do not respond instantly, but reveal themselves gradually.
More than nostalgia, it’s an ethic of care. Ceramics teaches me to wait, to observe, to trust in what transforms slowly. That, today, may be one of the most radical gestures.
Your works frequently traverse the threshold between stillness and movement, object and performance. How do you approach the notion of ‘animation’ not just technologically, but philosophically in your art-making?
To me, "animation" is not just a technique for giving movement to images — it’s a way of activating matter, of bringing it into another form of presence. Etymologically, to animate means to give soul, to breathe life. And that’s precisely what I seek in my work: movement that is not only physical, but existential and apparent.
Working with ceramics and video, with sound and fragments of body, I search for a kind of animation that unfolds in the interstices between what moves and what appears motionless, between vibration and silence. Animation, for me, is a state of suspension — where the object begins to act, even without shifting.
Philosophically, this process questions the border between the living and the inert, between body and matter. My works do not mimic life — they hint at it, summon it, sometimes even mourn it. Animation, in this sense, is making visible what vibrates inside what seems fixed.
By exploring new media, material methods, and unconventional ceramic techniques, I witness how ceramic art becomes potent within visual arts. It creates a fictional intertwining of memories, open to experimentation marked by ephemerality — giving life to the work and generating a truly immersive experience for the viewer.
Your published monograph features a preface by Pietro Maria Bardi, a towering figure in Brazilian modernism. How did this intellectual engagement influence your trajectory, and how do you relate today to the legacy of Brazilian modernist thought?
Having Pietro Maria Bardi write the preface to my artist’s book was, without question, a pivotal moment in my journey. More than institutional validation, it was an intellectual encounter with someone who approached art with radical thought and generous critique. Bardi had a broad cultural vision — he knew how to recognize the value of artistic gesture even outside hegemonic centers.
That dialogue profoundly impacted me. It was then that I understood the importance of seeing Brazilian art not as a peripheral reflection, but as autonomous production with its own language. Bardi’s modernism, though part of a museological and institutional project, also opened space for experimentation and questioning — something that still resonates in how I articulate art and thought.
Today, I engage with this legacy with gratitude and critical distance. I recognize its historical significance, but I seek to unfold it in new directions: more sensitive, more hybrid, more affective. What interests me is not merely inheritance, but reimagining the field from the margins, from silences, from minor gestures.
Much of your recent practice revolves around bibliographic and bibliometric systematization, a rigorous and perhaps underestimated aspect of artistic labor. What do you believe is the ethical or poetic function of cataloging within contemporary art discourse?
The bibliographic and bibliometric systematization I’ve developed in Brazil over recent years is not just an academic exercise — it’s a form of recognition. Cataloging is a way to give place, to make visible, to build a cartography of presence. In the art field, where so many practices are marginalized or forgotten, mapping is also a political act.
There’s an ethics in this work that deeply moves me: sustaining the other, even in absence. By gathering names, titles, dates, artworks, and processes, I’m not merely organizing data — I’m building memory, which for me is living matter.
The poetic function of this cataloging lies precisely in what it makes imaginable: unexpected connections, subterranean networks, continuities that resist erasure. It’s a way of stitching time and gesture. In that sense, my research work is also an extension of my artistic practice — only in another rhythm, with another texture.