Artist revisits source of inspiration for her 2016 installation "Silent, Silenced, Silence".
When I was artist-in-residence in the town of Otranto, Italy, I became intensely attracted to the Ottoman weapons (Cannonballs everywhere!) perhaps because my father and uncles had been in the armed service by the sea--Iwo Gima, Siege of Rome, Battle of Dunkirk, the Philippines-- and this combination of sensations and memories called me to make art from the weapons.
The bombards, cast from bronze, hurled huge stone balls, weighing up to 1,500 pounds, several miles. After one shot, the barrel had to be cooled in oil to be fired again. The cooling process took over two hour and was frustratingly slow.
To capture the essence of war in her sculptures, artist Christine Palamidessi used weapons from the 1480 siege of Italy.
It was a conceptual idea that lead the artist to cast the cannonballs form the 1480 Ottoman siege of Otranto Castle: to embrace not only the texture of the cannonball but also to capture the essence of the weapon, the energy embedded within the material, and to transfer that energy into her sculptures
ONE DAY I SAW THIS MAN IN OTRANTO. A WONDERFUL GREY CAT SAT ON HIS LAP. I ASKED IF I COULD TAKE A PICTURE. HE TOSSED THE CAT OFF HIS LAP.
Preview of Christine Palamidessi's cannonball pastels on painted pages of La Gazetta and La Repubblica.
When Gaia separated from Uranus, the conditions of the world as we know it came into being. Otranto Castle installation portrays this moment.
Visually visit Christine Palamidessi's ongoing cannonball installation at Castle of Otranto.
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