Bio

Francesca Antonello’s style is a combination coming from her background in sculpture linked to traditional jewellery techniques. The result is a play on textures and contrasts, of abstract and asymmetric shapes, often involuntarily sensual. Her design is recognisable by the delicate harmony of soft shapes. This is visible both on the wearable small-scale pieces and the large scale sculptures. Each minimum detail is thought to be perceived as natural and three-dimensional.

Francesca has always been attracted by the immediately palpable, but intangible and invisible, such as rock cycles, erosions, metamorphisms, and sedimentations in their slow and continuous change. The analysis of these phenomenons has induced her to a series of questions related to the passage of time, stimulating her research.

In subsequent years, during her MA studies in England, she developed the theme “Perceptible and concealed: an intimate research of surfaces”, maintaing a continuity with past topics, while discovering new and stimulating approaches with an in-depth analysis through readings, aimed at better understanding the meaning of “perception”, “duality” and “surface“.

She also explored the question of social integration, entitled “Beyond”, in which the pieces' textures wish to represent an ideal and harmonious melting-pot which goes over any kind of cultural, social and economic boundary. The artist designed and made a collection of wearable objects with meticulousness, basing herself on three founding elements: resistance, weight control and simplicity of forms. Nothing is random. The shapes may seem to be heavy but, on the contrary, are ultralight and have a pleasant tactile effect.

Her inspirations are expressed, and strictly connected, to the physicality of materials and vice versa. Her curiosity has brought her to explore different kinds of materials that have an identical aesthetical value and are not related to the economical value because they are uniquely functional to the effect she intends to give to the object.

Her intention is to draw the viewer to a tactile approach through sinuous shapes, as also by the warmth of wood. The designer mainly uses this organic material because of her passion for it. She considers it  the most precious of materials due to its texture, she finds it intriguing due to the fact that it is naturally fragrant, versatile and non-polluting.

Francesca loves working at the workbench aided by her tools. She has a passion for materials, mainly those which are 100% recyclable and preferably non-precious. In 2018 she  developed an innovative technique (patent pending) that consists in a laborious process that led to the creation of a hybrid material resulting from the use of aluminium foam with different woody essences.

Francesca is Italian-Argentine, born in Venice and raised in Rome, Italy. Since childhood, she spontaneously started carving wood with a pocketknife in an oak forest, and has never stopped since.

She studied at art-school, then subsequently Literature at La Sapienza University and as Technician in Woodcarving at the S. Giacomo School of Ornamental Arts in Rome. She specialized as Technician in Artistic treatment of metals at T.A.M., school of higher education directed by Master Arnaldo Pomodoro. From 2012 to 2017, she moved to England, where she achieved an MA in Jewellery, Silversmithing and Related Products from the School of Jewellery at BCU - Birmingham City University (UK), where she also completed a two-year long residency providing teaching assistance to the MA course.