Ceramics Residency · 2025
The 2025 Residents
Inaugurated in 2024, our residency welcomes international artists each year to spend 6 weeks to 3 months in Salemi, developing personal projects or drawing inspiration from the town's rich history. Meet our residents!
Maria Roy Delafeu
Ceramicist and artist · Spain
Maria is a ceramicist and artist from Barcelona. Her work unites strong conceptual depth with a refined, poetic aesthetic. She has developed a special connection with earth, treating it as a living material that carries the histories, politics, and ecologies of place. Maria will spend six weeks in Salemi, immersing herself in the area’s geology, community, and stories, using local clay and minerals to create rainwater-collecting systems for non-human species.
View profile & journal →Nikolas Iturralde
Ceramic artist with a graphics background · Germany/Ecuador (Berlin-based)
Berlin-based German-Ecuadorian artist Nikolas Iturralde brings a strong graphics background and visual inspiration to his stunning, edgy ceramics creations. Inspired by graphic motifs from popular culture (hovering between pop, kitsch and street) he translates them into elegant pieces with a sharp edge. Niko will spend three months in Salemi developing personal work and creating a mural installation right in the streets of town.
View profile & journal →Clara Holt
Ceramic artist and illustrator · Italy
Clara Holt is an Italian ceramic artist and illustrator. Her practice focuses on decoration and storytelling, rather than form. She collaborates with potters and sculptors who provide the vessels, and then transforms their surfaces into intricate figurative narratives inspired by mythology and personal history. Through her masterful use of sgraffito, she creates seamless connections between ancient myths and contemporary events, between the epic and the intimate, blending myth with the texture of everyday life. During her stay in Salemi she created a compelling mural inspired by the myth of Demeter and Persephone, drawing upon Sicilian mythological history as well as Salemi’s own links with harvest myths and rituals.
View profile & journal →Ebony Russell
Ceramicist (porcelain, piping technique) · Australia (Maltese origins)
Ebony is an Australian ceramicist of Maltese origins, with a strikingly unique gravity-defying approach to porcelain. She uses clay like cake piping and creams, with embedded moulded elements, creating pieces in between cake frostings and cultural relics. Her work deliberately overindulges in traditionally feminine motifs to question the role of women in the history of art and craft. Her pieces have earned international recognition and are part of major collections, including the V&A Museum in London. During her residency she researched the region’s rich ceramic traditions and took inspiration (and lots of moulds) of local sculptural patterns, to incorporate them in her process and reinterpret Mediterranean themes through her unconventional piping technique.
View profile & journal →Sari Ember
Artist (ceramic works and installations) · Hungary
Sári Ember is a Hungarian artist whose ceramic works and installations radiate a soft and delicate beauty. Look closer, and you’ll find subtle drawings etched into her pieces: faces, animals, fragments of nature, decaying bodies, and quiet tales of decomposition. During her residency, Sári continued exploring drawing on ceramics, combining it with wild clay research as well as woodfiring. Sári came to Salemi with her family, and it was a pleasure to see her weave together her artistic practice with creative, hands-on parenting.
View profile & journal →Rodrigo Treviño
Ceramic artist (pottery and sculpture) · Mexico
Rodrigo Treviño is a Mexican ceramic artist whose work spans pottery and sculpture, united by his exploration of geometric patterns and stylized forms. Rodrigo’'s pieces blend abstract, architectural, and anthropomorphic elements, often so seamlessly that they become indistinguishable. While in Salemi, he experimented with ash glazes and woodfiring in our newly built wood fire kiln.
View profile & journal →Anna Capolupo
Painter and visual artist (mixed-media ceramics) · Italy
Anna Capolupo is an Italian painter and visual artist. Although a painter by training, in the last couple of years she has started working with ceramics, mostly in mixed-media form. Drawing her inspiration from a rich oneiric world of personal dreams and cultural symbols, Anna creates intense and colorful works that often mix oil painting, bread dough, honey and ceramics. Her paintings and sculptures are both intimate inner landscapes and surreal reinterpretation of Southern Italy’s popular imagery. While in Salemi, she created several ceramic sculptures, wall pieces and multimedia pieces mixing ceramics and oil painting. She was able to draw inspiration from Salemi’s ritual bread tradition, which peaks with San Giuseppe festivities in the month of March.
View profile & journal →Dorothea Nold
Sculptor and ceramic artist · Germany
Dorothea Nold is a German sculptor and ceramic artist. Inspired by architecture and the seismic impact of an earthquake she experienced years ago in China, Dorothea creates beautifully intricate and ephemeral ceramic sculptures that seem to exist in a dream between nature and architecture.
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