Rita Meier:

Walking on marble

Hi, this is Materially Speaking, where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose. We’re 30 miles north of Pisa, near a town called Pietrasanta, nicknamed Little Athens because of its tradition for carving marble. The area used to boast hundreds of artisans or craftsmen who specialized in carving marble. Until the nineteen sixties, most of the work was ecclesiastical. But a papal edict from Vatican II put an end to that, leaving a hole in the economy.

So studio heads then courted artists to come and realize their work in marble. Today, I’m in one of the last remaining studios in the center of town, La Povirrera. The community of artists here hold regular shows, parties, and concerts. Inside the building, you can find a large collection of plaster casts of the classical statues from the olden days. And outside, the dusty workspaces are dotted around, with a stream running behind them.

I’m meeting Rita Meier, who’s worked in the area over the past thirty years. First of all, I asked her about the history and how the first sculptors came in the sixties and seventies.

So in the early years, nobody paid, you know, like in the seventies. And then slowly, slowly it attracted more sculptors, also famous sculptors who had their models copied here because of the very they’re very skilled here, these Articiani with the marble technique. So and then in Carchetta, there was this big marble company called Oro Hendro and the owner of that place in the 60s and 70s he was very interested in having artists working there even though it was making slabs and stuff like that. But they had people like Noguchi coming, Cesar, Jean Arp, Henry Moore. And they could go up to the quarries because Cervaiola here is part of Henro’s marble quarries.

And up there they quarries since Napoleon was in the region because Napoleon’s sister, she hired this henro in Paris. Maybe he was a geologist or something. And then they founded this company to quarry this fine marble. Five hundred years ago it was actually Michelangelo who went up there the first time in the mountain. So it has quite a history, this place here.

It’s very embedded, you know, in the marble stories and you hear all kinds of stories.

My name is Rita Meier and I’m from Switzerland. But then I left for The United States when I was 28 I think and I left there because I had an American boyfriend. We were eleven years together and then we separated and I came back to Switzerland. But I was in touch with his cousin who was a sculptor in Pietrasanta in 1988.

I visited him So I came the first time to Pietrasanta. He actually lived up on the Rocca which was a very special place and I was like flabbergasted because you walk on marble everywhere there is marble and I felt like wow it was really something very special when I was here the first time. I found it very familiar but I never was here and because I was always very keen about stones, all kinds of stones, I was taken by it all. I’ve never seen so many different kinds of marble, so much marble. So that’s how it actually started with my passion in the sense of wanting to do something with marble.

I have not really a classical artist education. I’m more self taught or rather I was lucky enough to go to a studio where there are many artists who I could either copy, they showed me, they taught me. There were artichanis, the craftsmen, the local craftsmen, which are and were very, very generous in showing us how to work marble. I remember very well when I was in that studio. It was a bit outside of Pietrasanta.

It was an international artist studio with quite a few Americans but also French, German, Swiss, Italians of course. And I watched them and I thought wow this I could never do. This is so hard work and you know I didn’t dare to even do anything. My luck was that I was among Americans. The Americans they don’t believe that you have to have a formal education.

Basically you just do. If you want to do it just do it. So they convinced me that I can just try and do it you know. And now after thirty years I feel like yes I learned a lot but I still don’t know it all of course. Know it’s like you learn slowly in many ways and it takes time.

And maybe that was also something which fascinated me with the media. It’s a very slow media. It’s something you cannot cut corners with it.

The day I met with Rita was very hot, and we chose the studio lunch hour while the machines were quiet. She showed me a stack of marble, of varying shapes and sizes, and she was so keen for me to appreciate their true colors, she tipped her precious bottle of drinking water over them until they glistened. Unperturbed by the fact she now had no drink for herself, she started to tell me what she loved about the different stones.

Every stone, even if it’s the same quality or the same type, is very different. Okay, favorite stone is the white Carrara marble which is called here statuario because it has a very fine crystal. And it really does what you want it to do in the sense you can mostly carve anything from very, very subtle fine thin details to really everything. And it’s a very translucent material, so you can also use it as a light carrier, so to speak. So it has a lot of possibilities in it, and it is also used for many many famous works like Michelangelo did the Pieta in that material.

And it doesn’t weather well so it must be in in a place inside. The grey Carrara which is grayish you see a lot of them in big piazzas in places of memorial works, portraits in cemeteries. That weathers very well. But the white one you have to have in the house. It has an egg color.

It’s got a very warm white. So it’s an expensive marble. So I usually work small works medium small so people knew that I like Sattuaria and when they were working on bigger works and they had some you know medium sized pieces they had cut off, they would bring it to me because they knew I would do something small with them. Later on I used more also for a change, for pleasure. I wanted to do more with colored stone because also here we are in that sense very lucky we can get any stone of the world.

What other stones do you enjoy and why?

Yeah okay I have a couple of works like in the yellow travertine from Iran and it’s rather soft but not too soft. Maybe about softness I should say we have 10 great grades of hardness in stone. 10 is the diamond is the hardest of all and then eight, nine, eight, let’s say eight could be like granite basalt, they’re very hard. Marble is about five, six so it’s considered rather soft which is not as soft as alabaster. Alabaster is very soft it’s like maybe two or something three.

So for me that would be too soft even though I have used a bit of alabaster because it has an extremely beautiful translucency. So you can really use it as a shape but also as a light carrier. And then with travertine I like about it the different shades of color. There is a red one as well beautiful also from Iran. Then there is the light brown one kind of a creamy one.

It’s from Tivoli in Rome. Half Rome is built with this travertine. And then we have a local one from Southern Tuscany which has a chocolate color which is also beautiful. With travertine again even though it has lots of holes so you think oh they break and it falls apart. No it’s very nice to carve it holds also nice details.

Then I did some French, red French which are lovely too. These different French ones. They’re red and white and they look a bit like meat, raw meat when you polish them up but they are beautiful. The latest one I did is Verde Ming called Green Ming like the Chinese dynasty. It’s the most lovely green there is a very light vivid green and it’s also easy to carve.

I’m not the type who would touch granite never ever. For me it’s too hard because physically you have to be quite in good shape for granite, even for marble. Since I work smaller pieces, it’s about, often it’s about size.

In conversations with artists about the materials they choose, they often mention factors like the weight of the material, their own physical strength, the availability of craftsmen to help them, and their choices of power tools or other, newer technologies. In the light of this, I asked Rita to expand on her processes and what tools she uses.

You know, I have done one bigger commission, a two meter high work, but it is rather narrow and I had to have some help with it for the we call it roughing out to get the big parts away. And I had a model so it was a twist, a one twist and so it had to be exactly that twist. So I had to have it punctuated, we call it, with the system they have here with the craftsman, which is their specialty. And then the rest I did, you know, bringing it all down to the real shape and all the finishing and because there are different steps. There are at least 10 different steps in how you carve, how you start, how you rough it out, how you slowly peel out the shape.

You have different tools available. One would be a saw like with a diamond disk. So that’s very efficient to cut stone. It cuts like with a knife through butter almost. With that fact it makes it also very dangerous tool so you have to be very concentrated and careful then you bang away with the chisel and the hammer because then you can for instance you can cut slices and then you knock away the slices because the stone itself has very little resistance when you make it weak at certain areas, know.

But if you for instance go in with a chisel straight in and you bang on it you have no chance of his force is stronger than your force, you know. So you have to know the weaknesses, you have to create weaknesses in the stone. And then we have the pneumatic tools which are very advantageable for us who are not so strong physically. We can work rather easy with these tools and shape closer, closer, closer to what we want to do. There are all kinds of tricks along the way, of course, and tricks in a good way you know.

How can you do it more efficient or how can you do it better or so you don’t see the white points for instance at the end when you have all polished up from the from the chisel because you hurt the stone when you go too straight in or bang too hard. You see those white dots for instance and they must not be seen.

Rita is a member of Vintraciati, a cultural association in Pietrasanta, The members host regular exhibitions of their work at the gallery they run together in the center of Pietrasanta, which is where I first saw Rita’s work. She explains her series of seed pods, which are the carriers and protectors of future lives, and tells me how their wide variety of forms show how they are always perfectly adapted their environment. I also saw Rita’s limpet series, inspired by exposed crystalline surfaces on some discarded statuario she was given. She loves limpets and began carving their fossils on marble river rocks, and finished them with a natural iron colored patina.

So in my work, I don’t do figures. I do mostly shapes. I’m inspired by nature but what I see it could be a leaf or a flower but it doesn’t mean necessarily I will make that leaf or that flower but it has maybe a very beautiful line in it or a movement. And then I make my sketches with that idea, different sketches and then I see a stone which would maybe work for that idea and then I start and then it can happen that I deviate because I suddenly see it’s maybe better I do it that way. And so it’s going to be it’s just like a process.

But then sometimes it happens like when I work in stone that I just go and follow something, I go, I do it, I don’t think much and then something comes out and I would have never thought of that shape. Never ever. It would be a shape which was completely different than what I’ve ever thought of. So it’s something I call it tapping into the unconscious. And it has happened that I also have started a piece and just put it away and said maybe I continue another time but maybe not. yeah it can happen you know, that you get stuck and it was either the wrong stone because sometimes you think that looks like a nice stone, then it turns out to be a very difficult stone.

Fantastic dogs. I love your studio. How many dogs have you got here?

Well, let’s see, we have two from Spain and then I don’t know what they’re called. Then we have five whippets. Seven, seven dogs. We have seven dogs. Somebody once said, are you a kennel here or are you a studio, carving studio?

Fantastic. And how about Getra Centre? Can you tell me how you felt when you discovered Getra Centre? How much time you spent here? Why it’s a special artistic center?

It’s the sculpture center of the Western world and it has a long history of stone sculpting, so marble sculpting. And many of these people or younger people often you know they came here, met in the piazza or they came to the studios. I’ve worked in several studios now and they said they sense something special here. And I sense something special and still do when I come back here. We don’t know what it is, we don’t know, we just feel it is caliente.

It’s a very warm place in the sense you feel very welcomed and you know you can work here well and you’re happy to work here because for one thing it’s very practical to work here. You have the stone, you have the tools, you have the know how, you have the studios, infrastructure, you have everything. It’s like in the medieval times, you know, when you had streets where they only would do work with iron or only with copper or only with lanyard wood. And it has still that old tradition that it is all embedded. Everything you need is locally available, everything.

Yeah, it became a very expensive quaint little town because it has a lot of beautiful architecture, has its own beauty really. It’s vivid with art because it’s called Cittadarte. Because there is so much art which is produced here so to speak but our studio for instance now unfortunately which is one of the only ones left within almost the town walls It’s a very bohemian place so to speak but it has a long history of traditional carving. But even for this area now it’s too noisy, too dusty and we start to feel a bit restriction. We cannot have any more people who want to work two, three meter works. It’s too loud, too dusty.

So everybody who wants to work, has big commissions, has to go now into the industrial zone. Because I think also since the European Union, the emission, nature, everything does noise, the security of the workers has, there are more laws now to have to be observed so that is restrictive also. I mean I remember days we were all, me not, but people were carving without glasses, barefoot, you know, some crazy people. Not Italians, but they were, the Darticani wear their paper hats, you know, made from paper and they surely were not a great protection of anything.

They used saws, the big saws, and they handled hundreds of kilos of stone. You know but they had a way, they learned, they had a way of doing it very slow with a lot of care and not very often something happened.

So thanks to Rita Meier, her work can be seen on her Instagram @ritamayasculpture or on the gallery website of intrachiati.it. For photographs of all the works discussed today, follow our Instagram or visit our website materiallyspeaking.com. And don’t forget to join our mailing list to hear about upcoming episodes. Editorial thanks to Duncan Thornley.