Episode 5: Washer women in the Venice rivulets

Season 1: Venice

Episode 5: Washer women in the Venice rivulets with Carolina Mazzolari

Carolina Mazzolari with one of her large scale tapestries. Image: Billie Scheepers

Carolina Mazzolari, an acclaimed Italian textile and video artist, honours the legacy of women who ran public laundries in the project Alone Together. Collaborating with Royal Ballet dancer and choreographer Kristen McNally and Royal Opera House senior costume manager Ilaria Martello, Carolina connects viewers to the invisible world of domestic labour through stunning video projections and tapestries on Venice's streets and in the Domus Civica Gallery, San Polo.

Growing up as the youngest daughter of a Milanese perfumer, Carolina's art is deeply influenced by the magic of illusion and connection, to make her artwork a sensory experience.

I met Carolina through Alfio Puglisi, co-producer of Art Destinations and director of the Sicily Art Residency Program, who helped bring this extraordinary exhibition to Venice. Alone Together exhibited in the SARP Gallery at Linguaglossa, Mt Etna, in July 2023.

In this episode we cover:

• how Alone Together uses dance, video and tapestry to share the story of the women who worked in public laundries in Venice’s rivulets, and in canals across Italy,

• the video was projected onto sheets hanging in the streets of Venice, outside, as well as inside the Domus Civica Gallery, San Polo, Venice,

• themes of collaboration and womanhood emphasise the collective power and energy generated when women work together,

• the historical significance of washerwomen in Italy and their communal labour,

• Carolina’s artistic journey from working in factories as a fashion designer to becoming an artist working with tapestry, embroidery, video, dance, and site-specific installations, and

• Carolina’s personal influences growing up surrounded by women and being inspired by their stories and strength, and the influence of her father's work as a perfumer on her appreciation for illusion and sensory experiences in art.

BIOGRAPHY

Carolina Mazzolari (b. 1981 Milan/London) uses psychoanalysis and intuition to reveal emotional experience. Her artistic practice spans textiles, printing, painting, photography, video, and performance. Carolina’s hand-embroidery and painted maps are characterised by distinctive silver-grey stitchwork that interacts with light, creating shifting depths and luminous illusions. 

Each map exudes an intimate quality, as the artist has spent countless hours physically interacting with the fabrics. The resulting maps resemble mandalas, conveying love, hesitation, awe, and struggle through a personal language, alluding to deeper human motifs.

Carolina collaborates with 'Fine Cell Work,' a UK-based registered charity that employs and rehabilitates long-sentenced inmates through embroidery, to create the largest hand-sewn works.

Carolina's video and textile work are part of the permanent collection at MONA Museum in Tasmania, Australia, and have been featured in significant exhibitions. Carolina was born in Milan, Italy and currently lives with her family in London.

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah Rhodes: Welcome to Art Destinations. My name is Sarah Rhodes, an artist based in Lutruwita, Tasmania. In this fifth episode of Art Destinations, I'm in conversation with Carolina Mazzolari, an Italian textile and video artist living in London. As a daughter of a Milanese perfumer, Carolina knows the importance of creating illusion and connection through her art. In this episode, we explore her collaboration with London Royal Ballet choreographer and dancer Kristen McNally, and the Royal Opera House senior costume production manager, Ilaria Martello, to honour the women around the world who ran public laundries. We focus on Venice in particular, where women came together to wash clothes in Venice's rivulets. Their work Alone Together comprises of a video of Kristen McNally dancing both in the sea at Portofino and in the studio, together with two large-scale tapestry works.

SR: The video was projected onto sheets hanging in the streets of Venice, outside the Domus Civica gallery in San Polo, and the tapestry work was presented in the gallery's front window. Alone Together aims to connect us with everyone involved in invisible domestic work.

Art Destinations will be published fortnightly and each season will focus on one place. The first season explores Venice and aims to provide an understanding of the layer tourists rarely see. The second season will focus on Tasmania and the third, Sicily. Please take a minute to sign up to the email newsletter on the website artdestinations.org and follow this podcast on your hosting platform so you don't miss an episode.

Carolina shares her story from working in factories as a fashion designer to making the choice to be an artist working across tapestry, embroidery, video, dance and site specific installations. Welcome Carolina to Art Destinations, it's great to have you here.

Carolina Mazzolari: Hi Sarah, it's great to be here.

SR: This podcast is set in Venice and we're in conversation with artists living in or who are making work about the Venetian Lagoon. And we're here to discuss the film and the tapestry installation that you made titled Alone Together about the history of women coming together in public laundries in Venice's rivulets. Now in our early conversations, it became clear that there are many themes in this project that relate to other conversations we've had with artists and curators that we've interviewed in earlier episodes. And they include Alice Ongaro Sartori, Cosimo Ferrigolo and Enrico Bettinello. All of them actually, which is quite interesting, relate to making work that's site specific, looking at the performance, the relationship between the artist and the viewer, and the importance of collaboration.

SR: And what's really come through with Alice and yourself is the collaboration between women and how that makes something that's very powerful. So I thought that maybe we could start this interview or this conversation with the idea of collaboration, because you're collaborating with artists across many disciplines to address the stories of women. And because you're collaborating with many disciplines and different people, you're getting a range of perspectives. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about the collaboration with Kristen McNally and Ilaria Martello, and how this project came about, and what it was about the washerwomen and that captured your imagination.

CM: Ilaria I had met during a project that I was collaborating with in 2012. She was assisting the head of costumes of the Royal Opera House. I was making the textiles as I was still working in a factory in Italy, I was helping Conrad Shawcross to produce the textiles and helping design the costumes for the last shows of Monica Mason at the Royal Opera House with the Royal Ballet. So it was the end of her career kind of performance. And I was lucky enough to be asked to develop these textiles for the show. After the show happens, we haven't really seen each other or anything, but I was looking through my samples and one was missing. So I reached out to Ilaria at the Royal Opera House where she was still working there and we reconnected. We are both Italian from Milano. And we started a conversation and she came here and she saw some of my art films that were called I Dance Alone. She obviously being at the head of the senior costume production manager, she obviously works in close collaboration with the dancer, very intimate because they do all the fittings. There is a very private collaboration with every full dancer.

CM: So that was key. And we started talking and we then started shuffling and exchanging ideas later on after that meeting about how we could take this little research I had done in the past into something that would be more meaningful and impactful, having more dancers and giving more scenographic and context theatrical thing. Obviously, I come from contemporary art and Ilaria Martello, she is in costumes. And she said that she knew a choreographer in Royal Ballet working for the Royal Academy. She's a choreographer and a wonderful dancer. She's been one of the first dancers of the schools. We met all together. We bonded. She loved the idea of the washerwomen. So she was interested in the choreography itself. So everything fell in the right place. And COVID happened. So as you know, things change quite quickly and theaters were closed. And so I had the possibility to work with her because also there was no budget. And what actually enabled the project to finally grow was that we were in lockdown and they couldn't train and rehearse anymore. So they had a lot of time in their hands. And so we had quite a long time to design this choreography and going through all the elements and metaphorical elements that this choreography should have embraced.

SR: You and Ilaria are both from Milan. Can you talk a little bit about the washerwomen in Milan? Explain to the listeners who the washerwomen were?

CM: Yeah, the washerwomen, more in the 18th and 19th century, there is this historical sites in Italy that are everywhere. There is a river, which are the Lavanderia. And they're made of stones. They're like abandoned temples. And it's where women, they used to go and meet in the village, in the city, and they could wash their own things. Or maybe there were some other women that were employed by others to do their own washing, obviously. But they were kind of a public site that you could use to do that because they were not washing machines. It wasn't like spread until after the Second World War. It wasn't very common. So these sites are very interesting because they're like temples and they're so evocative. You can feel the women being there, having been there. And so it was very romantic thinking that we could transform and aestheticise, but also create a choreography of this labour when it's done and gathered and done together becomes almost like a ritual when you see them doing it. I wanted to give this particular wave because I work a lot with textiles. And it was very important for me and Ilaria to link one of the labours of female labours of the past with something that is connected to our work.

CM: Because that's one of the processes that allows us to create the final thing we're doing, right? The cloths all comes from there, the washing, the preparation. It's a preparation of what we're going to make. So that was very important.

SR: 'Cause I just thought that was really beautiful, you talking about the washerwomen on the sides of the rivers all across Italy and how they're coming together and it's like a ritual. Can you paint a picture of what that would have looked like in Venice?

CM: I think, yes, in Venice, they would have had probably the same structures. And they also, they designated areas that were the only areas where you could hang the sheets, because that obviously would impale people from walking through because if it was scattered across the city. So there are areas we know, they're very famous, they're called le Chiovere where you had the access to the water, they're important, and then you could hang the sheets. There were also other areas where women were employed for putting together the sails of ships. And so you had the dying area and designated areas for that. The common denominator of this is that the city always offered a public space where you could go and do your laundry. These sites are usually near a river or a canal or in the lagoon and where the water passes and you can just access to it freely. And it's everywhere, not only in Venice, as I said, but even in the mountains on paths, you find them. It was very common in Italy.

SR: If you were going to visit Venice, which part of Venice would you go to see to remember those times?

CM: There are various areas, le Chiovere in Venice, which has a particular language as well, they have a slang. Le Chiovere, there were these open air spaces where the etymology is chiovi, which is nails. And these places, they were used to pull all the sheets, anything, or even if they were dyed or if you went there to wash them. So le Chiovere is a place and that's the place, and this is a kind of word that you find in many boroughs, which are called Sestieri in Venezia. You find these words, the word of le Chiovere, le chiovi, the nails.

SR: In each of the areas around Venice, they have this Sestieri?

CM: There are campielli where you find the water access. And when you find this word, le Chiovere, it relates to the fact that this was the area where they used to have the nails on the walls of these paths, so then you could hang. It was designated, so people that were walking around basically, they knew that that area was designated for that. You wouldn't walk through, I think.

SR: So collaboration's been a really big theme for you, working with Kristen and Ilaria, but also focusing on the women coming together. So what is the significance of womanhood and collaboration that's coming through in this work, or in your work more broadly?

CM: I think for all of us, the collaboration is key to the project. It's all about womanhood and sisterhood, and it was key for us to express this collective power that women make when they work together. And even if it's a very difficult labour, it's very interesting when women get together because it creates a sort of energy. And we were trying to depict kind of this ritualism that comes out of menial tasks work, very hard labour work. And so it was important for us that this project was a female ritual, that what we wanted to achieve in the end, and create a choreography that me, Ilaria, Silvia and Kristen to work exclusively with women, but also without excluding anything else. It was a female-led project from the beginning. I contacted Mira Calix, who is this brilliant composer, contemporary composer. I needed the film to have a sound. And so I reached out to her because in those days of lockdown, we were texting a lot about politics, and we were more in contact than we would usually be. We are friends because we've been on other projects with her, not directly, so I knew her personally. And she said that she would have loved to collaborate with me. And it was crazy about this idea of the washerwomen, because she had spent two years researching about these water drummers, who are washerwomen in the Pacific.

CM: And the water drummer also was always ever performed by women, and in the Pacific especially, that created this technique of water drumming in the water while doing the laundry. And she had put together the sounds and this composition, and she had reached out to this other composer. And so then now she knew why, she said, I know why I've done this research, because it's so direct linked to what you're saying. So that was very lucky. And then we started, I started researching on this thing.

SR: So did you end up working with that, or will you ever work with the Pacific Island drummer women?

CM: That's what we wanted to achieve at the beginning. As I said, she passed, so she couldn't complete the score.

SR: It's really interesting that you've decided to make a site-specific work, because you could have easily made either a live performance, or you could have made a video art that was seen in a more static environment. But you've made something that really brings the streets of Venice alive. Would you please describe what the people saw when they were walking past, or when they visited your exhibition?

CM: It was very interesting finding this location, Domus Civica. And I did it with the help of Luca Berta in Venice, who is an amazing producer for Art Production. And he helped me, considering we had no budget. And we found this incredible institution, kind of thing, that it's now been led as a charity. It was a house that was hosting girls, and was giving an opportunity to girls to stay in Venice, study in Venice, being fed, with very, very reasonable pricing. So it's kind of a charity-led, and it was about girls. And this big house, the Domus Civica, rises above the Chiavari, the Chiavari street, which is the street of the Chiavi, where they used to pull the lines of the sheets. So that, there was a lot of symbolic things that led us to decide that that was the right place to do it. It was supposed to be itinerant and growing, this project. So it has many ways of adapting to very different architectures and spaces. It's site-specific here in this particular location, but it has a multitude of ways that it could be done.

CM: Anyway, in the streets, they have these five very large windows, which usually are exhibited as being white walls and having some paintings hung. But we decided to open two of the main windows and create a set there that was projected during the night. So at night, when people would walk to the station to take the last train, especially, they would have this experience of this extra space that was completely changed the perception of the street itself. It suddenly created another room, another space for to look into. Very colourful.

SR: So it was a gallery space with five big windows and then your tapestries were shown inside the gallery?

CM: These five big windows hosted the film projection and the cloth hanging inside the main two windows and had a deeper depth space inside. So you looked in and it was like looking into a little theater. Then the other two windows were hosting the tapestries and the descriptions of the work and the information and the inspiration of the washerwoman.

SR: And so describe the tapestries.

CM: One of the tapestries that I presented is a line I've been researching on this new technique. It's like a sculptural tapestry that I'm making. It's very minimal and it's this line that grows and gets sculpted onto the cloth. The other tapestry is a small map, part of my other series of work and it embodies the movement and the expression of these things moving on the line. And it's deep dyed. It has a lot of work on the colours, on the watercolours that is on the canvas and this black line that goes through. It's a different work but the two things work together abstractly to embody the line.

SR: Okay. So your two tapestries essentially are referencing the rivulets or just the washing lines?

CM: I'm not very literal when I work in this. I didn't want to create a direct conversation in that sense because my work is very abstract. The abstract metaphor is for this research that we have done.

SR: I think it's quite interesting the idea that you mentioned earlier about it being a textile work and that the women are washing textiles and that you're referencing the materiality of what the women are doing in an artwork. I think that's quite lovely. So in the Alone Together video that you made, you shot it in Portofino, in the National Park there and it is such a beautiful, beautiful location. Describe what you were looking for in that film.

CM: So we were very lucky. I always wanted to, obviously we needed to find a free location to film this performance of Kristen. And I had the previously filmed in this little bay, which I knew that I had free access to it and I kind of knew how to move around there. So it was easier for me to decide that that was the place. That morning when we arrived filming very early, we saw that there was a huge massive tree that had fallen during this storm. Also, I didn't wanna film because it was very stormy and I thought the sea was gonna change, but actually created all that interesting clouds effects that we had. And so we found this incredible huge tree where she could wash and do the whole choreography with this large sheets of white cotton. There was another responsive element suddenly, and it was so beautiful and so evocative and it went really, really well because Kristen, she is an extraordinary dancer and choreographer and she's very in control of everything, of all her movements. So she embraced straightaway this new element that wasn't considered in the theme. And actually it added so much to the final performance.

SR: I'm actually really interested in the idea of working across disciplines. So you worked with a dancer, I mean, you've probably worked with dancers quite a lot before, but when you're working with another discipline, they're really bringing something out that you might not have thought of yourself or you can respond to and then develop your ideas from there. So how much of your practice is film or visual and how much of it is textile?

CM: I think film photography always gone for me very together because at the source of any research you need to do some photography and video. So I actually started as a young kid, 16 working for a magazine. And I was a photographer and I was doing that. And then at university or in any design project, you use photography and research, you create your own data with that. But also when I started just making art, it's channels very well what you wanna communicate. Better than just arriving in a room of tapestries, what is the context, where it comes from, what's the story? And so photography and film helped me in the years to channel this other thing. So I like to use this language where I use them together. They are intertwined, I think, and...

SR: Yeah, I really like that.

CM: The washing and the things obviously come from this continuous being a textile artist. I have to do a lot of prep with my fabrics, with my cloths. I am also... I became a mother very young, so I've got all that domestic is always crept in my practice. I spent quite a lot of time having to do that. The dyeing, the layering of the colour is not one go. It's many goes. It's washing, preparing more denting the fabric, boiling it, adding there is so many procedures in the dyeing. When you're when you're printing is different and everything. So I am lucky enough because also working in textile factory, which I loved as my job, but parallel to being an artist. And so I kind of kept on feeding these skills into textiles. So I have embraced mostly every aspect of the textile world from being in a factory for Jacquard threads. I tried to use every time they gave me a medium, using that medium the textile world to create, to make something. So the washing and it's all linked. And we use the metaphor of the washerwomen because we related better to the physicality of this.

SR: It sounds like you're a curious person who likes to push themselves to find yourself across so many different mediums. I'm just wondering, how did you get from working as photographer to working? Were you a textile designer at Jacquard?

CM: Yeah. Well, I did a textile university. That's my textile design at Chelsea. That's what I graduated with. I obviously presented a final project that was more into, it was more contemporary rather than product. I didn't graduate with the idea that I was gonna be a designer, but then obviously when you finish university, I got into things and I needed to pay my bills and I got what came through. Everything was an experience when I was 20 years old. So I got this job and I loved it. Kind of pushed the boundaries in me of understanding the industrial parts of the Jacquard factory. It means that you use, instead of using pigments, you use threads and these machines are quite complicated. And then you have patterns and it gave me a complete new thing. I just had finished prints and I was very much into dyeing. Then I did this one, but also there is all the stitching parts. So all these kinds of cross contamination between the tailor, the head of dyeing and all these things has always been part of my practice. I wanted to mention that who inspired me a lot was the women of the factory in Italy because I was very young and just being there, going to the factory with them.

CM: But I was a young designer and this army of women that was working in this massive factory near Tuscany, they were all quite at their age. And the factory was so hot and they would show up every morning and leave every night at six and they were so resilient and so strong. And that's what really inspired me because they taught me everything and they kept on saying, Carolina, you're not patient at all. You are like, your patience is everything. So I was trying to work out how could they be so strong and physical at those ages. But also they were incredibly skilled, the amount of skills that these women had, apart from threading the machines, stitching, cutting, bringing the fabric rolls to the drying machines. It's like a factory, female led factory. So everyone is a teacher in there for me.

0:25:07.1 SR: There's a really strong thread of women's work, I guess, or the womanhood. Is that what has attracted you to this? Your art form, chosen art form is sort of traditionally a woman's domain really with embroidery and textiles. And you know, you're surrounding yourself with women in terms of your collaborations, as well as working in the factory and finding that inspiring. So what's taken you along this path?

CM: For me, maybe the factory experience I just mentioned was key because these women they had to work together so efficiently through really difficult tasks in the factory to make this happen. Even some clients don't even know what they want and you had to kind of make that work anyway. So they were really inspiring to me, but also just a lot of things that I've done about the women. It's all about women and labour and then forgotten labours from women that women have. The women that preceded us have written the history is because the workforce of women is so inspiring, if you read it and I decided to focus on the washerwomen because it relates, it really relates to my practice. I do that in very small scale. I have experienced it in many other projects.

SR: Not really. It's sort of only in modern day really, that women have been invited into the workforce and then women are still fighting for equal opportunities and equal pay. So it's quite interesting that women's work is such a central part of your focus as though like the work that they're doing was probably unpaid largely. But it's lovely that you're valuing it.

CM: I think that some of the work was paid and that was the first time they, through these kind of jobs actually they would receive finally some pay. The women that went there for pay, no, obviously not the domestic, we are not talking about the domestic one that we have to do anyway. But for the washerwomen, they were in the labour force, these kind of jobs where the jobs that led them to have more freedom and to be able to have some earnings that didn't come directly from their husbands, for example. So in a way they were vehicles for their independence as well.

SR: So you were mentioning earlier that if a wealthy family, if a wealthy husband bought his wife a washing machine, then she would no longer go down to the river and have her social life. And so it was kind of a bittersweet. What has replaced that because the washing machine obviously is here and the washerwomen are no longer meeting at the river.

CM: So our goal was actually to try to celebrate what we have lost, right. Shared female experience. That was what we wanted. And we wanted to celebrate this labour, this community coming together through work, the collective share of woman experience. We wanted to celebrate that. I think what replaces nowadays, it's always, you always find it in work. There are so many other aspects, but there are still factories now there are more factories and maybe that's what I'm trying to say as well. You kind of see that kind of community coming together only when women work together and they struggle together and they have to accomplish something together. And then, and sometimes when the task is repetitive and we are all working together, we're struggling. 'cause some jobs are very difficult and we find that kind of sense of empathy towards one another. And we wanted to depict that in the film by giving it a graceful and like, if it was a ritual, a tribal ritual, we wanted that. So that was gonna be the tribal choreography. The dance was gonna enable this thoughts and memory. And it was beautiful because it's a minimal, very beautiful, minimal, cathartic way to look at the women with the feet in the water. Now it's obviously more complicated and less, maybe less beautiful.

SR: You filmed the Alone Together in Portofino with Kristen dancing in the water and on the log but you also paired that with her dancing in this sort of black box studio performance. So you've got the contrast between the studio and the natural environment. Why did you decide to do that?

CM: We decided to do that because we wanted to have a visual ref... Like different reference in the video was like a merging thing aesthetically and conceptually in the film itself. But the idea was also to record this choreography for potentially having one day the public performance that we were hoping for.

SR: So the black box was kind of mimicking a live performance?

CM: Yes. The black box, the full black box, if you see it, we have it all recorded, is we have recorded the, all of the movements in length and could be reused for training for free, schools and ballet schools participate in a possible urban group performance.

SR: You have a really strong social conscience to your practice. You're really interested in the relationships between women and the importance of the relationships that women have and how everybody supports each other. And I guess support is a really strong theme through your work, how you work with people, you're very generous. Do you have a actual sort of philosophy or an approach to your practice that has this sort of social conscience or ethos?

CM: Thank you. I think it's a good question, yes, it started, it triggered when I was already still in Milan and I was working in this factory, in fact, in Tuscany, in the market, near Tuscany. So I was smoking a cigarette outside and I saw that there was this little tube of plastic coming out of the wall of the factory that was dripping liquid into the straight into the ground, which leads to the the water or reservoirs or anything in the ground, straight into the... So I asked one of the ladies that if, what was it? And they told me that it was the waste from them. It was obviously illegal waste from the laundry, the dry cleaner machine when you prepare the product you kind of wash it with these kind of chemicals. Stayed with me so much because I didn't wanna be part of that kind of history or I suddenly realised I couldn't do this and I didn't wanna be part of it.

CM: And plus the things that were in there were my samples. So it kind of striked me and I realised that they were doing that all the time and that that was one of the thousands of factories that we have in Italy and multiply that for all over the world. And I'm sure we were like respectable enough not to even do any harm as much as other places. So I kind of had the epiphany and I decided to quit. Obviously, transited, I said I don't wanna make products, I don't wanna be associated with production anymore. And then I went to Mexico and I was lucky enough to go into this whole collector's homes with artist friends and I realised that I could have put all my research, of this six months research. I try to do every time I create a new series into one work.

CM: And I make it all myself and I was more meaningful. And so I just quit being a designer and I took two years to create a new practice that was incorporating all the skills I had gained from all these years, working in all sorts of departments, plus being an artist and I united the two practices together. So being a filmmaker, an artist and a designer, and try to make that into one thing. I wanted to be original to myself and honest to myself about if I do something, I really want to do something I really like doing, I enjoy doing, it's that it's meaningful to me, that it doesn't harm anything or anyone.

CM: And it took two years, but I'm in my first two tapestries and I think I was very pleased and it was very different from anything that I'd seen before. And so I decided that that was it and I had to continue. And I always kept the language between the film and the physical work the duality of that. The performance aspect kind of came in also with Ilaria because Ilaria gave me the security because she's so used to work with so many, on so many public events, like in the theater, theaters such as the Royal Opera House. I would get too stressed about having to worry about all these rules working with dancers is incredibly delicate because they all have a particular personality, you have to be careful about, it's a lot of social work you have to do as well, such that there are so many things that someone that comes from my world doesn't know about the way you deal with them and what the procedure, so she brought in the project this security in me that we could do this together and bring it to another level.

SR: That's beautiful. And so the tapestries, some of the tapestries are quite large.

CM: There are maps. At the beginning I started this mapping. When I went abstract, most of my maps are metaphorical maps, inner states. So I researched a lot on psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic text associations. I try to read everything without being too literate. I try to use this text that I wanna read and understand all text, ancient text, contemporary, essays, whatever there's been. And these texts, they help me create some shapes rather than others. And at the beginning, I came out with this collection of maps depicting invisible mind states. I use those as guidelines to create new shapes.

SR: Okay. And you mentioned that you get prisoners to help you work on those.

CM: Yeah, I was lucky enough that many years ago in Ireland, I was making my first super large tapestries by hand. And I met the founder of Fine Cell Work, which is an incredible charity in the UK that employs and rehabilitates long sentence prisoners through needlework. It's also a very much female led charity because it's been founded many, many years ago by these few women going and teaching in prison how to stitch. And now it's become huge. They employ so many prisoners across the UK and they have a program of volunteers that go and teach them the skills.

CM: And so they can participate in making these works and get a salary. And also sometimes prisons are very grey. So the colours of what they do is every colour they see in a day. And it's incredibly, it builds up self esteem for them. They get a salary. So suddenly someone said to me, Carol, if you're gonna make tapestries like that, you're gonna stitch one tapestry in your lifetime but why don't you ask them if they could? And they were already doing collaboration with artists. If you look them up, you can see. And so we started and now it's been many years in many years, I've decided to continue with them despite the fact that from my first drawing, it takes eight months sometimes to receive the base.

CM: So usually I start by drawing in August or September. I design my own, or in the summer I design my own new collection and then I send it to them, but I will receive it after in February or March. And then I do the finishings slowly one at a time of each of my artworks. So some of my artworks take a year and some of my artworks take six months, others two years. Sometimes I give up on one and I concentrate on another. Sometimes we work on five different ones, but I'm keeping the system of not approaching factory led or something that would push up the system at the moment. That's how I've been working.

SR: Yeah. Well, you could probably see the hand, the by hand, or oh, I guess in factories as well, they do it by hand.

CM: Yes. These factories I'm talking about, they do employ hand embroiderer, like such as in India, but you don't know where, how this is controlled. So for me, it makes more sense to have it here. And I know I'm doing something good. Of course, the craftsmanship it's behind these prisoners is outstanding. And I try to value the fact that it takes so long rather than but everything is made by hand. So every stitch in the works, every single stitch in the work is made by hand.

SR: And it's the story, so many people's stories and such fascinating stories that you can only imagine have touched the work. So that kind of leads me to this you went to Mexico and decided then that you could be an artist or you would love to make your career as an artist.

CM: Because the art I was making before it wasn't made of textiles, but then I realised, I don't know why I had this epiphany. Actually, because I was keeping the textile as more, I was making work with words and photography and video. But then I realised by being exposed to all these arts that actually I could have been an artist using my textile skills and blend all together these elements to make my own medium and that relieved me a lot because I... That it's so important for me, all the textile art, it's taken a while because it is not so easy to translate. I didn't wanna be craft. So that, it's important to say because from the first tapestry I made, I increasingly became more abstract and then abstract. And I decided that the silver colour was the only colour that could make me transit from craft to contemporary. And that you could see that tapestry is a contemporary artwork instead of seeing a tapestry being very crafty thing, my job was to try and translate that into a very contemporary artwork.

SR: So what does the silver represent?

CM: In Jung analysis, you know, or basic, they said the archetypes. So at the beginning I made all these figures, they were the archetypes and some of them had this little suit embroidered suit. Beautiful. It's like an exoskeleton made of stitch. And looking at it, I decided I wanted to extract, but also I quickly realised that the silver, the gray allowed me to transit and make the work, making it more symbolic rather than crafty and helped me transit. So it helped me, it helped me probably personally transit to that direction because the silver is a colour that is associated to gray to stone, to metal rather than the actual, knitting a sock that is colourful. I don't know if I'm explaining myself at the moment. [laughter]

SR: So it's more elemental, you mean?

CM: Yes, it's more elemental.

SR: So it's more running to nature and more soulful.

CM: The silver channels better the abstract that I was trying, the abstract language that I wanted my tapestry to be in, rather than being fabric work. It is just helped me move forward in the direction that I was trying to get for the visuals of the actual physical work, the tapestries.

SR: Were women a big part of your life growing up?

CM: Yes. So I think also apart from the factory experience I had, I am the youngest of four sisters and my father is a perfumer, so he always employed a significant number of women in his practice. So I was always surrounded by so many women and I feel that women have, I've heard so many stories since I was a child, everybody, all these women, they loved me. I was going from one to another and they had so many stories and they're so strong. And what I realised early on is that each one of them had this a fantastic story, a powerful story. Each one of us has a story and women are incredible. And being the youngest of full the gap and you know, the social gap that there is between me and my sisters in the way that we've been brought up in terms of freedom and education is huge.

CM: And I think also this inspired the work about thinking how these women that I am trying to revive and to bring back in the project, in what social context were they and what was their labour like, labour life like? And so it's incredible because if you think about how much have women achieved in terms of rights and freedom, being the youngest of four for me a huge privileges that my sister didn't have, just even in the way you would think about something and you know, whatever I think and I wanna do, I can actually do this is how I've always kind of been, despite being still a girl, but they had much less than me.

SR: If your father was a perfumer, he's creating this illusion really. And he's also creating a connection or trying to create a connection between people. I feel like that would have had a, an influence over your own art practice because as an artist, that's also what we are trying to do. Would you agree with that?

CM: I think, yeah. I think art is an illusion and you know, it's temporary and it's confined in what you're trying to communicate. And same is scent, because you create this illusion, you recreate this memory. Sometimes it's a memory and sometimes it's a new thing, but it's always trying to create that illusion that it's behind the makeup of something.

SR: So what was it like growing up with a perfumer and how did your father start that, start his career doing that?

CM: He was just a son of a barber and he started working like 10 years old. I think he finished primary school and he wanted to work because it was the end of the war. There was not much food and it was complicated. He was complicated and he wanted to work. So he started from helping his father's barber shop and at home, they had this little room at the end of the corridor where they were distilling colognes to sell to their customers that went for a shave. And so there is this beautiful idea of my dad's coming in through the door downstairs and he could smell at the second floor of his flat, but at night he could hear the dripping. He would fall asleep with the dripping of these colognes being made at the end of the corridor, which is quite a romantic idea.

CM: But also the work in my family has always been respected very much because he didn't become a perfumer like that, he took him, you know, he was in a nose that was a genius and was recognised, this was a path that has been earned through a lot of work. And so I think the idea of work, labour and work always resonates. Also in the project that we are doing there is, I like the idea of this respect that we have and achievements. And before you get to being an artist, you have to train and sharpen your tools and to being the best at what you're doing at your craft.

CM: So that was the inspiration really, that you have to really get to be the king of your craft before you can actually do something great. In the past it was, there was much more freedom then in accessing and traveling around freely. So you could also travel around freely from Milan to Venice through canals and rivers. In fact, my dad, when he was young, they used to all go together with these little tenders and camp on the banks of the rivers from Milan and get into Venice. I don't think this is possible anymore. And I think through it's much more controlled, the waters are much more controlled in that way. Whether there may be less in the way we protect our waters, like so. Yeah.

SR: Oh, I just can completely imagine, you know, camping on the side of the river from Milan to Venice, that is really beautiful. Did you go on many family holidays yourself? 'Cause that was when your father was a child. So did you do that as well?

CM: He liked that freedom. We didn't have a summer house like many Italians. So we had this small boat and we used to cruise a lot and sail a lot in the Mediterranean together every summer. It was kind of something we did together. So we were our family and we would stay and sleep in the middle of the sea rather, quite a lot without help, it wasn't like a fancy thing, we just kept around anything, just my dad and my sister and my mom. And even when the little baby was born, my brother, we would sail anyway. It was much more free even there, it was easier. It was more approachable by everyone. Now it's become something elite. I was lucky enough to experience just kind of super free thing.

SR: That's a really lovely image to end on. I think sailing the Mediterranean with your family, a family of five children, was it?

CM: Yeah, we were five.

SR: Yeah. I can just imagine your mother wrangling them all on the boat to keep them on.

CM: Yeah, that was a problem. We had, now I'm going to do it and you can cut it out. So when I was five years old, the boats that we were on took on fire. And so I finally, we were in the middle of the Mediterranean and it was a real problem because the engine was on fire and 360 degrees, there was no one. And I saw my, I remember my dad being completely panicked. And so he May Day, May Day, SOS, SOS until he remembered a friend that was on the same way. But after an hour or something they arrived, closed. But it was a serious thing. The boat took on fire and it was melting and it was going. So we had to swim across to go on the other boats. By the time we were on the other boats, they rescued us. The boat we were on completely sunk. So that was, you know, water in my work has been very present. I don't wanna make it into a thing because obviously water is the source of inspiration on so many artists and so much art in history and nowadays. But that is for sure, I was always interested in that and the colours and the cathartic is linked to it.

SR: It's amazing how many artists actually have these sort of near death experiences and then make the work about it, particularly with water with Bill Viola. He does something similar, I think.

CM: Yeah, Bill Viola is very similar to what I've experienced when I had to jump at five years old on my father's shoulder. I jumped in the water because all my sister had left, they were much older than me, but I jumped with him and I sunk down, so deep down. And it was my first time I went so deep. And I opened my eyes and I saw this crystal water with bubbles. It was beautiful, but at the same time, I couldn't breathe and I was terrified. Sometimes it happened that when I saw those videos of that... With the people with Bill Viola's work, relates to that a bit. He's very good at creating that transition there.

SR: Okay, Carolina, thank you so much for coming along and sharing your story. It's been really, really interesting.

CM: Thank you, Sarah. It was very interesting talking to you.

SR: Thank you for listening to the fifth episode of Art Destinations. Next, we are in conversation with Nuvola Ravera, an artist who works with a professional psychotherapist to imagine the island city of Venice as a person. This is an interesting idea to me as my own work looks at the parallels between the geography of an island and the self, using the idea that place shapes who we are. Please subscribe to Art Destinations, wherever you find your podcasts, and sign up to our newsletter on our website, artdestinations.org, as we send out fortnightly newsletters promoting the next episode. I'm your host, Sarah Rhodes. Ciao for now.