It’s impossible to keep me away from Otranto!  Just about every year I returned to Otranto.  I think: in a past life I must have lived there. Maybe I was a female Crusade who launched out from the port. Or maybe this spot on the planet flows in my ancestral blood and has a memory. I am certainly drawn to the place, its beauty, history, colors, warmth–and iced Salentino cafe (pictured above; made with almond milk).

In 2015, with the permission the government archeologists, I cast the cannonballs in the Aragonese Castle of Otranto. To cast the cannonballs, I used a paper casting method typical to Puglia.I worked for a month,  everyday in an orange shirt–just like the city workers who were repairing stairs and installing handicapped access.

The granite cannonballs are huge, thousand-pound weapons that seem to have been impossibly hurled  from a cannon mounted on an Ottoman ship in 1480. 

In 2017, I exhibited the cannonballs as part of the “Silent, Silence, Silenced” installation at Atlantic Works

Gallery in Boston.  Here’s the link