Lívia Rizzo has shared this text with us, in which she talks about herself and her artistic practice:

I grew up in southern Brazil, in a family of artists. I chose to study Design, but spent my university years working in the culinary arts. From an early age, I was captivated by the possibility of transforming materials with my hands and evoking a sensation in others – something capable of lingering in the memory.

It was also during this time that I first came into contact with ceramics, whilst attending the studio of a great ceramicist who was our neighbour. At that moment, clay entered my life as a possibility, a discovery that would remain tucked away for a long time.

Life then took me to many places. I lived in other countries, immersed myself in other cultures and tried my hand at different fields of work. Each experience broadened my perspective, but also brought me closer to what had always been there: an interest in processes, in nature, in everyday life and in what can be transformed.

More recently, whilst living in Bali, Indonesia, my passion for ceramics returned with a visceral intensity. I spent a year immersed in nature, reordering my priorities, reaffirming my values and learning to live at a different pace.

Studio Api was born out of this experience. ‘Api’, in Indonesian, means fire: the fire that moves and energises. The same fire that passes through the clay, leaving its mark. Amidst the hustle and bustle and concrete of São Paulo, the studio is a place of slow living, of listening and sensitivity, where I continue to seek a life in harmony with the simplicity and rhythm of nature – the life I would ideally like to live.

Long summers on the beach. Winters in the mountains. The smell of damp earth, the warmth of the fire. On Sundays, the table set with flowers picked from our garden. A quiet balance between refinement and simplicity.

It is from this everyday life that my perspective is born, and the way I have learnt to be in the world.

I understand myself through these processes. Through working with clay, I have learnt that I am drawn to the strange, to that which demands a second look; to that which remains in an almost unfinished state — as if it still held the possibility of transformation.

I am interested in the atmosphere of a piece, in the presence it creates, in that which remains beyond the object itself. I seek out in nature the elements that will make up these surfaces. I layer them with great freedom, often using my hands, feeling and conveying these sensations.

This is what I seek to achieve: an experience, an emotion, a sense of strangeness capable of arousing curiosity and, in some way, resonating with others.