Far from mild romantic frivolity, ceramics, reclaimed as art, reassert their craggy poetry. A rogue fleck, a warped lip — all part of the charm, records of what’s undergone to exist. For this, Spanish ceramicist Rita G. Rivera cleared the shelf of the ubiquitous, choosing what endures: clay in its utmost affective earthiness. Where industrial design prizes perfection, Rivera restores the “active matter” agency of the handmade. Clay is no longer inert but participant — a rhetor that outlives its maker.
Reviving age-old methods practiced for millenniums, Rivera draws the Strait of Gibraltar to a seam of clay — Mediterranean in temperament, her inquiries kneading a shared, earthen tongue. Though settled among the hills of northern Morocco, her work has not sated her wanderlust; it channels it through combinations of coiling and paddling that punctuate the quasi-monastic bucolism of her routine in her atelier on the outskirts of Tetouan, a house of fig and medlar trees: The House Where Trees Dream.
As her first solo show, The House Where Trees Dream, opens at MCC Gallery, we caught up with Rita G. Rivera on "vaulted rooms”, kiln-roulette, and ancestral passations.
Maria Yigouti: "If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace,” wrote Gaston Bachelard. To what extent does your inaugural exhibition draw on your atelier, perched on a hill and surrounded by olive trees, violets, and poppies? How tonalized is your first solo show to the modes of your inner space and its pastoral context?
Rita G. Rivera: Every exhibition has its own intimacy. Mine springs from the hills around our workshop near Tetouan, a small house that’s more than a workspace, as it breathes our way of being. My practice may start in that rurality: its pace and humility pressed into clay, yet it manages to get emotional. I try to blur authorship and reach for a universal sentiment.
The installation follows the same trajectory. The room opens with a series of jugs, wafting the atelier’s slow patina and earthy mist. At the center of the annex, the sculpture You Said You Love Me lies strewn, flowers scattered across the floor — a direct analogy to love’s fragility and passion’s frailty. This sense of scattering, fugacity, continues in the subsequent installation of engraved ceramic plaques: an emotional archive of private exchanges, literary lines, and song lyrics laid under glass. Photographs of winding paths, a blazing sun, and abysmal craters extend the scenography from its rootedness to the cosmic.
I conceived it all to envelop the visitor, stirring latent emotions. In a sense, the exhibition is that “vaulted room” Bachelard describes — a shelter for the dreamer, where the intimate and the infinite coexist.
