my mother’s bread boards | 2025

My Mother’s Bread Boards is an installation currently in progress made from very delicate, unfired, terracotta clay replicas of my mother’s favourite chopping board, which she has owned since she was twenty. In its final form, this work will be a performance and installation made up of two hundred boards. These clay boards came about as a meditation on my mother’s family history as terracotta clay brickmakers in northern Italy. My maternal family lived on Via Fornaci (Kiln Road), the same road that housed the Fornace da laterizi F.lli Ferretti. This was the family brickmaking factory.

At the height of their brickmaking business, the Fornace Ferretti clay bricks and roof tiles became saught after for the particular shade of red their terracotta clay produced. It was a shade that came to be known as “Rosso Ferretti”, i.e. “Ferretti Red”, after my maternal family surname. The performative gesture of casting moulds of my mother’s bread boards out of South African terracotta clay that, when left unfired, is subject to breaking or reshaping in water, is a meditation on the shifting soil and transnational foundations I come from. It is a meditation on the terroirs that have formed me and through which I continually unlearn and reconfigure collective histories. With over fourty years’ worth of use, this battered, beloved board has provided a soft landing for many meals and many communal moments of gathering.