The Portrait of Dreams

Elena Pelosi

The interesting thing about life is that it always presents you with choices, moments when you can correct your aim and get to where you wanted to be.

1. Bio

Having graduated in History and Conservation of Artistic Heritage, she spent 10 years as a creative consultant and another 12 as creative director in an international architecture and design studio before founding her own studio in Milan. Her personal research into design and the arts is never-ending, and she travels all over the world to get to know different raw materials and styles of workmanship and different cultures. Since 2020, she has been applying structure to her great passion for ceramics, setting up a workshop in which she is personally involved in the design and production of one-off pieces, always crafted both to be useful and to tell a powerful story.

2. The power of a dream

I didn’t immediately do exactly what I had in mind. Maybe I didn’t even know exactly what I wanted. The direction I wanted to go in was clear, but not the details. The interesting thing about life, though, is that it always presents you with choices, moments when you can correct your aim and get to where you wanted to be. Then there are some moments when you are ready and others when you are not. But, that’s the amazing thing about dreams: it’s as if they cyclically come knocking again, they just need us not to abandon them altogether. If we keep the will to be in control of our story alive, I am sure that, by always pushing in the same direction, it is always possible to find the way to shape your dream.

3. My journey into real beauty

The earth has always fascinated me and today it is how I shape my view of the world and a new awareness of myself. Creating ceramics has proved to be an incredible training ground for life and an extraordinary way of telling stories. I harvest the earth in the places I visit, and each piece I create is a direct story of a territory, as well as of a concept. Ceramics has taught me the beauty of slowing down, of waiting. It testifies to the importance of having an in-depth knowledge of things, in a mix of poetics and technical knowledge of the material. Here you see tangible evidence of what happens when you speed up or push things one step too far. I think it is an extraordinary metaphor for the way we can read and interpret life.

4. What I learned and won’t let go

The value of time, even when we are waiting, is a very precious thing, which is to be appreciated; before, in my somewhat neurotic international studio life I often forgot this. Taking back the concept of proper time is, after all, taking back our freedom. Standing still is not necessarily a passive, sterile act. If we experience it well, it leads us to a deeper understanding. What I dream for women is that the day will come when it will no longer be necessary to make this distinction. It is frustrating to still have to talk about things that women can or cannot do. We are all extraordinarily different, we should learn to value ourselves for our skills, sensitivities, and visions, not for our gender.


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