Interview
Meet Sofia Melluso
Sofia's journey with clay began unexpectedly at a workshop at Studio Mud in Palermo. There she found that working with this material "immediately felt instinctive, almost domestic", something she could no longer give up.
"I realized that making ceramics for me was a natural and simple gesture, like many everyday acts such as cooking, kneading bread, or baking a cake."
Sofia Melluso is a Sicilian artist who works across ceramics, drawing, photography, and writing. Yet ceramics remain her main tool for thinking about time in a non-linear way:
"When I work with clay, I feel I enter a suspended dimension, where the gesture belongs to a history much broader than my individual time."
For Sofia, every piece is a conversation between past and present, between the individual hand and the collective memory it carries.
The ritual of making
Ritual sits at the core of the work Sofia does. She approaches it not just as performance or aesthetic choice, but as a framework for understanding how humans have always made meaning together.
"Shaping, firing, and repeating gestures are actions that activate an ancestral creativity, made of unconscious memories and bonds with those who came before us. Ritual is not only symbolic. It creates community, connects generations, and transforms an individual gesture into a collective experience," Sofia shares.
Her most memorable firing captures this perfectly. During the Vampa di San Giuseppe, a popular religious festival in her neighborhood of Kalsa in Palermo, she placed her pieces into the communal bonfire built in the square.
"It was crazy because I had no control," she says. "Some works came out intact by miracle, others shattered. It was special because I felt part of a collective rite, not just an artistic gesture. Everyone burned what they wanted as part of the ritual."
That surrender of control and the relationship between intention and the unexpected is also present in her favourite piece: a totemic ceramic figure in raku.
"During firing, the colors emerged unexpectedly, with cracks and shades I could not control. I love this piece because it is the result of a dialogue between my gesture and chance: it reminds me that ceramics are always a collaboration with fire."
Psychedelic bread and folk knowledge
Among her projects is one inspired by the legend of the "Majare" (the local witches of Alicudi, a small Sicilian island).
"I discovered the story of 'psychedelic' bread from Alicudi by spending time on the island," Sofia explains.
It is said that bread contaminated by ergot, a parasitic fungus, caused visions and "flights" among the islanders.
"I am interested in this intertwining of food, beliefs, and collective imagination," she says. In her hands, bread becomes a ritual sculpture: an everyday object that can "open up symbolic and transformative dimensions."
It's the folk stories and myths that often inspire Sofia's work.
Art residency in Salemi
Sofia arrived in Salemi with bread and ritual already on her mind, but also curiosity to engage in a dialogue with the local community and its territory. Alongside her ceramics, she'll be documenting the process through photography and writing, with the aim of building an archive or fanzine to accompany her sculptures. We can't wait to see Salemi's bread rituals and stories take shape in her ceramic pieces.