HARVEST - Porcelain Sculptures by Etra Masi
Limited-Editions Drop 18-31 March
With Harvest, Italian ceramic artist Etra Masi explores the object as a place of passage — a form that receives, transforms, and releases. Working with pigmented porcelain, she creates sculptural vessels where colour, material, and movement record the traces of encounter.
Presented as a limited Avant Craft drop, the collection reflects Masi’s research into contemporary Italian ceramics, where porcelain becomes both structure and memory.
Artist Statement
The image is simple: a porcelain shell, an open oval, almost a cocoon. Everything revolves around the idea of containing — of gathering or welcoming.
An empty space is offered, waiting to be filled. The movement of the sculptures is irregular; there are cuts, holes, scratches. Each piece can rest differently on a surface because it has no base. Its balance is unstable.
I do not impose a single movement on the forms; I allow them to rotate freely and find their own place.
I want to create a fluid space where nothing is fixed, where everything is free either to stop or to move on.
In the exchange between what remains and what departs, each body gives something of itself to the other.
I introduced colour to mark this exchange. The white of the original material absorbs the colour of whatever passes through it and stratifies its structure. Colour is therefore not surface, but part of the body of the work — not decoration, but foundation and visual memory, because it marks a presence.
The elements mix and generate new substances, opening infinite possibilities.
Like the water of a river along its bed: the water flows and carries a little earth with it; the earth yields to the passage of water and changes its form.
Harvest is a temporary home — made to welcome those who inhabit it before allowing them to continue their journey.
Technique and Materials
Each work is hand-shaped in porcelain in its plastic state. Colour is obtained by adding pigments and metallic oxides directly into the porcelain, tinting the entire mass of the material.
Single firing at 1260°C.
About Etra Masi
Born in Naples, Etra Masi developed an early fascination with Hellenic art and classical forms, shaped by the historical stratifications of the city. She studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where she explored the relationship between sculpture and architecture.
After moving to Faenza in 2015, she immersed herself in the region’s renowned ceramic tradition, refining her practice through the study of porcelain and craft techniques. Today, her work investigates porcelain as a sculptural medium, creating forms that move between vessel, architecture, and contemporary ceramic sculpture.
Alongside her studio practice, Masi collaborates with interior design studios and leads workshops on porcelain techniques at the Faenza Art Ceramic Center.
Each work in the Harvest series is hand-shaped in porcelain and produced as a unique sculptural piece.
Curated and presented by Avant Craft