Renata Cassiano

Renata Cassiano was born in Mexico City in 1981. Her work is rooted in curiosity, experimentation and a desire to know materials intimately. Her sculpture embodies the materiality of transformation. Mixing clays, glazes and temperatures to break the rules of the process is central to her artistic practice. Clay attracts her for its capacity for memory and change, yet it is its demand for attention, time and labour that makes us yield to it.

Cassiano’s practice is deeply influenced by her family and Latin American context. Her parents are archaeologists who devoted their lives to deciphering the remains of our past. From this perspective, she views the object as survival: objects with a sense of permanence and timelessness. For her, ceramics embody the natural vulnerability that exists within all of us, and the tension between the ephemeral and resilience. Commitment to craft is vital within her practice. Her sculptures are artefacts of ritual, visceral witnesses of what happens internally in the act of excavation and interpretation.

She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, United States. In 2024 she received second place in the XIV National Biennial of Painting, Printmaking and Contemporary Ceramics Alfredo Zalce. In 2023 she was a finalist for the Hopper Prize, and in 2020 and 2022 received honourable mentions at the Veracruz Art Biennial, Mexico.

She has been awarded grants and residencies including: Artist 360 Grant, Mid-America Arts Alliance and Walton Arts Foundation, Fayetteville, Arkansas in 2021; Zenobia Award, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Edgecomb, Maine in 2019; residency grant from Lanzhou City University, China, in 2018; master artist residency grant, Clay Gulgong, Australia, in 2018; and residency grants at the International Ceramic Research Centre Guldagergaard, Skælskør, Denmark, in 2014 and 2013.

Renata Cassiano lives and works in Xalapa, Mexico.