Rina Bernabei

Rina Bernabei ceramic practice complements her 30-year award winning design practice, as an industrial designer. Her work explores materiality and process, echoing her research in emotional design and the relationships between handmade, craft and manufacture.

Her ceramics brings together her experience of designing objects for interiors, and the tactile aesthetics of clay. Her vessels explore the archetypal vase forms. Each vessel is an assemblage of materiality and the making process.  The vessels are an interplay between structured and unstructured forms, between holding and displaying, and between the machine, human, and nature. The wheel-thrown ‘machined’ vase base juxtapose against the distorted, textured ‘collars’ created through deliberate hand intervention and the randomness of the firing process. They create a stage or backdrop for the floral ‘act’, rooting it in place and time, a tiny vignette for the interior.