Yemisi Wilson:

Material of Memory

I often collaborate with the natural form of the stone and I also especially like to leave lots of the natural stone and I like stones that has kind of like a crust. I go in the quarries and sometimes I find stones where there’s hollows, you know, because water has been dripping on them for like hundreds of years. And I like those signs of the time because stone is the material of memory, of course. Time is locked inside the material itself. So when you carve in stone, it’s like the first time when you carve that that piece sees the light again.

Hi. This is Sarah with another episode of Materially Speaking, where artists and artisans tell their stories through the materials they choose. Today, Mike and I are heading to a foundry, Fonderia Versiliese, in the center of Pietrasanta. Founded in 1975, this family owned foundry is run by the three brothers Tiberio, Franco and Gabriele Lucarini. We’re meeting Swedish Nigerian sculptor Yemisi Wilson.

Yemisi lives in Stockholm but has also worked in Pietrasanta for many years and creates in marble, granite and bronze. She tells us about her family and how her work explores heritage, identity and the material memory of stone. Her love of animals is often a theme in her work and she’s also currently creating a series about strong women. This is our first full episode recorded in a foundry. You’ll probably hear the noise, and we’re excited to hear more about the lost wax casting process.

Outside Fonderia Versiliese, we see a man at a table quietly working with a brush. Inside, however, we’re greeted with a cacophony of noise. There’s flames, heat and a vibrant energy, much different from the feel of a marble studio. We asked Yemisi to introduce herself.

My name is Yemisi Wilson. I have a Swedish mother, a Nigerian father. I was born in London, raised in Stockholm since I was one year old. I lived in Italy for twenty two years. I studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, and then I moved here to Pietrasanta, where I stayed for thirteen years.

And I always come back even though I moved back to Stockholm thirteen years ago. This is Fonderia Versiliese, so it’s a bronze foundry. I started to work with them already in 1999 when I first came to Pietrasanta. I was sent here by my school in Florence, Accademia di Belle Arti, because there we did the waxes, but there’s no foundry in Florence. So they told us to come to Pietrasanta, and that’s how I discovered Pietrasanta, actually.

So when I only had my thesis to write, I said, should I go to Stockholm and stay there for summer and go to the libraries and find the books in Swedish and translate them to Italian to write my thesis? No. Too much work. Why not go to Pietrasanta? So I went to Pietrasanta.

June, I moved here and I stayed for fifteen years. And thirteen years ago, I moved back to Stockholm, but I come back several times a year. This is a treasure as you know. Yes. So this is a family owned foundry.

The three brothers, Gabrielle, Tiberio, and Franco, and their father lived at that moment. He’s passed, unfortunately. And lots of the people are the same people that were working here when I came. So that’s a very nice, beautiful sign. Behind us, we have Federico, and he’s preparing my small hippopotamuses.

And they’re gonna be patinated tomorrow morning by Giovanni.

Can you tell us about this work?

Yes. I have a line of animals, wild animals mainly, in stone and sometimes in bronze as well. So this is the first one I do. The hippopotamus is seated like this, and it’s only gonna be a small addition, only seven. And they will each have a different color of patina them.

I’ve also done 15 small torsos of women. You will see them inside. And those are the last 15, so maximum 30. I usually don’t do so big editions, but they’re very small and they’re very likable. So

So are they going into a show somewhere? Or

Yes. They will be shown in a show in Orebro, a town two hours away from Stockholm, so it’s in Sweden. I will be having a show there that starts the February 28 next year until the March 12.

Can I ask a little bit about the significance of the hippopotamus that you’re doing here?

Yeah. I had been doing other animals like elephants and rhinoceros when I was working at Studio SEM here. And then an American client came to the studio and said, I would like to have a standing hippopotamus. And he brought, you know, like a little plastic thing. And Keira McMartin, the director of Studio SEM said, that cannot carry the weight on those small little four legs.

It’s gonna you know, the big hippopotamus body will be too heavy. And also it had a very big and open mouth. She said, I have a sculptor here who’s very good with animals. Let me ask her to do a model. If you like it, we can do it.

So I made a couple of models from him of a seated hippopotamus, which he liked so much. So that’s how I came into doing the seated hippopotamus, actually.

How do you learn about correct anatomy for this animal?

I study. I see films, movies of the animals. I put up photographs of them. I do them in clay, and then I eventually I do them. From the clay, I look at the clay, and I do them in marble.

So the hippos are kind of another flavor for you.

I love animals. I had lots of animals when I was a child. I had four aquariums in my room as a child. So I like to study the animals and see what they needed and create their perfect biotope, so to say, even if they are prisoners or something. But and then they would have children, and I would like to see how all of that evolved.

But the humans came after some of these old animals, and I’m so infatuated by their incredible anatomy. If you look at a elephant, you know that old story, three blind persons would describe an elephant and one touches the ear, another touches the tail, and somebody else touches the trunk, and they explain what they felt and what they see, and it becomes many animals, you know. So these animals like hippopotamuses and rhinoceros and elephants, they are so incredible with their anatomy, is so perfectly made for where they are. And again, I talk about time because it’s like we humans are so much newer to the world than these animals, so they are also testimony of ancient times, so to say. So that’s why I’m fascinated by their anatomy.

And I think especially like the hippopotamus, the volume it has, that it looks so cute, but it’s actually one of the most dangerous animals, kills more people than lions as we know. And also, think since we are newer than the animals to the nature, to the world, we have become the dominating race, and we’re not so nice to the animals and the nature. So we’re, like, stepping too much into their habitat and so on. So that’s maybe also why I like to do animals to show that we are interrelated. There are 15 small female torsos over there.

Do you want to see?

Yeah, let’s go.

I really like when they are striped like this but these would be patinated, they would be like black, dark, but then polished. So what stands up, these lines here, will be golden. And some of them have different textures, so to say, and they will also be patinated in different colors.

Has the foundry involved in the whole sort of process of these guys?

Well, I come with them looking like this, but red in red wax. So I come here and I give them my waxes. First, this is embedded in plaster and terracotta that’s been mashed together, and it becomes like una pasta that they put around it. And then they put it on, how can you say, like a trunk, and they make channels with plastic. And they use plastic cups, and they use wax as well so that they create a tree, one could say.

And then they pour the liquid bronze, and the liquid bronze takes the place of the wax that just kind of disappears or it’s burnt, you know, away.

What’s the inspiration for those?

Well, these are just an inspiration of the classical torso of the women. We’ve seen it so much in art history and so on. A strong female body standing firm on the ground. Safe and sound and strong, you know?

But you’re also working small, which Yes, is

yes. And these, I’ve also ordered, they will stand on marble plinths, eight centimeters high per five and five. Black, Nero di Marquinha, and some would be classical Carrara, white with a little bit of grey. They look almost like somebody is winning a prize or something, you know? Maybe it’s because I was born on the March 8.

In Sweden, when I grew up and I saw there were posters with a fist like this, I was like, I wonder why everybody is so angry on my birthday. And then I moved to Italy and I was in Florence. I would go to the market at the March 8, I could see a man, 93 years old, with his bicycle and a big, big bouquet of mimosa that he was going to bring to his wife, you know. I would go inside the cafe and they would say, no, no, no. Ojinolopagil cafe.

It’s the women’s day. You don’t pay the coffee today. So it was la festa de la donna, you know. They were praising the woman. And in Sweden, we were occupied with feminism, know.

Same day, different ways to celebrate it.

So last night, I was watching a video interview of you and you were talking about your two different grandmothers and I thought it was wonderful that you were celebrating them each with different sculptures. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Sure. Well, my Swedish grandmother, Anna, she died when my mother was eight years old. So we always had that kind of grief and sorrow for her. And she was a very strong woman. My mother was the last of four children and they grew up in the country side in Sweden.

It’s part of our family history, you know, when she was so young when her mother passed away. And she was a very strong woman in that family, you know. And my grandfather, Oscar, he was a fine wood carpenter, so he made clocks for the wall. He made violins. He made furniture.

He was a very sweet man. And when my mother wrote to him from London saying that she had met my father from Nigeria, my Swedish grandfather, Oscar, wrote back and said, I hear you have met a man from Africa. He is welcome. And that’s something important to remember today. When my father would come to the countryside, Vaermland in Sweden, they had never seen a black man before.

When me and my sister grew up in Stockholm, we were usually the only black child in the whole school, you know, that was normal those days. Now it’s very different, of course. But anyway, then my grandmother, Ebenorla, she was also a very strong woman. I only met her once when I was nine in London. And when I was born in London, she sent a list with names from which my mother could pick the names for me.

So Ebonyella was also one of my names, and Yemisi, she picked because she had a friend called Yemisi in London.

So I like the series that you’ve just showed us. It really resonates with that.

Yes. Yes.

Definitely a theme of strong women.

I like to make strong women that’s independent and so on.

You work in different kinds of stone. Yes?

Marble, Swedish granite, Indian granite. In fact, I’m going back to India this December. And then Spanish alabaster, and also Swedish porphyros, which is the absolutely hardest stone I’ve ever worked with.

Does it mean anything to you as a Swedish person to work in Swedish stone?

Yes. I had a public commission this summer where I did sculptures in the natural material of granite on a public bathing space. So that was very particular because these stones will stay there, you know. It’s not like a sculpture that you bring into a hospital or that might be moved. They will stay there and they were in the nature.

So I had to be very respectful, I think, with what I did so that it wouldn’t annoy people to see it there for many, many years to come. In Sweden, we have, like, two, three, four, variants, but the one that you see often is, like, dark, violet, and his characteristic is that it also always have these small spots inside it. You know? Each stone requires different tools. In porphyries, for example, I cannot use my chisel and air hammer as I like to do in marble because it’s so hard and it’s also a little bit glassy.

So I use electrical tools with that. Also, with granite, I usually use electrical tools and not so much the air hammer at all.

How did you first get involved with sculpting, painting? What was your intro?

Yes. I did drawings and so on since I was a child. And maybe I was doing sculpture when I was two years old because I wanted to take some toilet paper and wet it and probably sculpt something out of it, but I’d lost my balance and I went inside the water toilet. So my little brown fleshy legs were standing up from the water closet and my friend Krista, a Swedish boy, he went to my mom in the kitchen like, Oh, Yemisi in the toilet, Yemisi in the toilet. So she ran there and fished me up.

So maybe that was my first attempt to sculpture.

So what made you decide to pursue this as your life career?

I think just the passion and loving what you do so much gives you a very strong motor inside. I was actually doing painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, but I had bronze and marble as extra mediums in school. And when I had the hammer and the chisel in my hand, it was just like dancing. No questions. Just like put me on the dance floor and I’ll dance.

You know? So it was instinctive. Some people would say, oh, it takes so much time to carve. You know? And you have to be so patient.

Yeah. But you have to be likewise, unpatient because you have to keep going because you’re so curious about what’s gonna happen when I go around the corner. You know? So you have to be driven by curiosity as well.

If you would perhaps explain a couple of projects projects that you’ve worked on over the years that are special to you, and could you tell us why?

This experience I had this summer when I worked at the East Coast Of Sweden. I mean, I’m from Stockholm, and the East Coast, close to Gothenburg, the Gothenburg people, you know how it is with the big city and the second big city. They always say that we are on the sunny part. We are on the We are on the front of Sweden. And now that I lived there for a month carving these sculptures, I understood what they mean because it feels like you’re on the front row of the sun.

They have small whales there, and they have sea stars. So there’s a different water there from the water I’m used to in Stockholm and the Stockholm Archipelago. So to work and actually do carving of seals and crabs and other animals directly in the stones there, granites that are 1.5 billions of years old, and to get to know the people who live there today and hear them talk about their grandmothers and fathers who made a special path over there, then you really get connected to the place. And to be able to work with their stones, it felt really like a privilege. I wanted to take inspiration of the place I was in.

So the May 4, I did my first work, and I made like a head of a small whale coming up from a special pink flower there, and the stone is like a pink granite. So it’s just like as if this whale is looking up from a sea of flowers instead. And then I made seals and I made crabs because they fish crabs there, and the children play with the crabs that they do what they call a crab race. They fish crabs, and they see which one comes first back to the water. So I wanted to do things that were local and kind of, like, make them eternal in the stone.

They have a tradition of knitting, so I took a couple of designs special from that place, and I also carved that in stone. And the people who lived there really liked that because they were worried about, oh, an artist is coming here. What would she do? You know? And we are who are walking here every day, like, in our face every day.

They were quite worried about what you know? But then they were happy that you come and go and everything looks normal and, oh, you see a detail. Oh, look. Here’s the seal looking out from that stone. So it was in a way respectful, but also playful.

The children like it. They find things there, you know. So everybody was really happy, and that made me very happy.

Anything else that you could tell us about a theme or a project

for the show? Monkeys have also been very interesting to me because I started to draw them when I was in Rome. I was exposing together with other artists at the Swedish Institute. And then I went to the zoo there, Nelbio Parko, in Villa Borgesen. And I thought I would draw elephants and hippopotamuses that they have there.

But when you’re in front of a big elephant, you know, and it turns inside to you, there’s not much more than a big wrinkly gray wall, you know. And then I discovered the monkeys, and it’s just like, you know how we artists like to do the nude drawing, and you have to be quick because they move, and the monkeys move even more. So it was such a good experience and practice to draw them. Every time they moved, I switched page. So then from drawing them, I started to do them in sculpture.

And last year, when I was in India, I made three monkeys in the Indian granite, and you know these monkeys.

Hear no evil. You see no evil.

So I made mine instead like this and like this and one shouting or speaking. I’m not the first artist to do that. I’ve seen that somebody else has done it, but mine are a little bit humorous. You know? Of course, I want to make this as a comment to things.

In Sweden, we have lots of gang violence lately, and sometimes you read in the papers, there’s lots of corruption and so on. We have that in many countries and also people who are not well psychologically. So I want to emphasize to listen to each other, to speak to each other, to speak about what we see, you know, something’s not right or wrong, and to talk to each other, to have a dialogue, you know, and to be open. So if something is fishy in a company, you should be able to speak about and sort things out and so on. So that’s my message with my monkeys.

I like how you put your work on the stone into sort of this grand historical perspective of millennia and centuries of things that have touched the stone and then how you talk about opening it up to the light.

I often collaborate with the natural form of the stone and I also especially like to leave lots of the natural stone and I like stones that have kind of like a crust. I go in the quarries and sometimes I find stones where there’s hollows, you know, because water has been dripping on them for like hundreds of years And I like those signs of the time because stone is the material of memory. Time is locked inside the material itself. So when you carve in stone, it’s like the first time when you carve that that piece sees the light again. And archaeologically, the remains of humans history are usually in stone.

So thanks to Yemisi Wilson. You can find out more about her on her website yemisiwilson.com or on Instagram at yemisi wilson. As always, there are photographs of the works we’ve discussed on our website materiallyspeaking.com and on Instagram at materially speaking podcast. If you enjoy Materially Speaking, please join our community, sign up to our newsletter, which you can find on our website, to hear about new episodes and our special events. Also, please do take a minute to give us a review or send us a note.

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