About
The creative process
Not a recycler. An artist who listens to materials and gives them a second life more beautiful than the first.
Cira Pignatiello
Art born from listening
Growing up in Palermo between craft workshops and the Ballarò market, Cira learned early that beauty does not need to be new. It needs to be seen.
After training at the Academy of Fine Arts, she began working exclusively with waste materials: branches after storms, metals from demolished sites, papers from decommissioned archives, plastics recovered from the Sicilian sea.
Each piece carries two stories: that of the material and the one the artwork tells. Art that lives twice.
The method
Four phases, one artwork
Collecting & listening
Everything starts with a walk. Through forests after storms, along coastlines, in the courtyards of buildings being demolished. I collect materials that others have abandoned, paying attention to their shape, weight, the traces of time they carry. This phase can last weeks. You don't collect to accumulate: you collect to understand.
Study & design
The collected materials spend time in my studio before I begin a project. I observe them change with the light, touch them, place them together. Sometimes I understand immediately what they want to become. Other times I wait months. I never force an idea onto a material: it's the material that suggests the artwork.
Transformation
The making phase is silent and physical. I weld, incise, paint, weave, glue. I never use new materials in the process: even the adhesives, pigments, and threads are reclaimed when possible. Every gesture is precise: in my practice there is no second chance. Every mark stays.
The artwork in the world
When an artwork leaves my studio, I deliver with it its passport: the history of the materials, their origin, the hours of work, the places they come from. Whoever acquires an artwork carries two lives: that of the material and that of the art. This is the meaning of art that lives twice.
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Every commission follows the same four phases. The result is an artwork that speaks of your space and carries a true story.
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