Benedetto Ferraro
I am not trying to represent something. I am trying to understand what happens when matter changes.
Clay is the point of departure. It is a living presence, able to hold time, mistakes, the pressure of the hands, and the transformations that happen through the work and the firing. Every work is born from this confrontation, without an entirely predictable outcome.
The forms I make are essential. Circles, stones, columns, cubes. Archetypal figures slowly traversed by a growth, a fracture, or an inner energy capable of changing them. It is there that I recognise something profoundly human. Every transformation leaves a trace. Every equilibrium already contains its own change. I believe that we too, like matter, are the result of continuous metamorphoses.
My works speak of this.
Of what resists.
Of what transforms.
Of what continues to be born.
A path
Benedetto Ferraro was born in Maratea in 1983. He lives and works in Tortora, in the province of Cosenza, on the border between Calabria and Basilicata. In 2009 he founded the Terrenotrie studio.
This borderland — its history and its layered traditions — is not a backdrop but part of the material he works with: a rootedness the work cannot be separated from.
His practice moves between sculpture, object, and installation. The works — unique pieces, signed — are born from the earth: refractory clay and glazes, slab-built and hand-built.
He is represented by Artemest, the curated platform for contemporary Italian art craftsmanship, and his work is also shown at L2ARTE, a contemporary art gallery in Pavia.
Selected exhibitions
Since 2012 Benedetto Ferraro has taken part in numerous ceramics fairs and festivals across Calabria, Campania, and Le Marche. In 2023 he was awarded second place at the Premio Fratelli Melis — International Biennial of Ceramic Art. He was also selected for the 2014, 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023 editions of the «Ceramica del Mediterraneo» competition in Grottaglie (TA).
The smallest gallery in Calabria.
Two spaces in Calabria. The Lab in Tortora Marina is the workshop where the works are born. The Art Gallery in Praia a Mare is the exhibition space, where the works are shown and sold — always with the time it takes.
- Lab
- Via J. Kennedy 31 · Tortora Marina (CS)
- Art Gallery
- Via Amerigo Vespucci · Praia a Mare (CS)
- Visits
- By appointment, Monday to Saturday
- Contact
- info@terrenotrie.it · +39 329 815 0225 · +39 351 575 8911
Ceramics Courses
Learning to work in clay in a small group, at the pace the material asks for.
Intensive courses of three or five days, in small groups of up to six participants. Each season, on request: a new course is arranged once the minimum number is reached. In Italian and English.
The earth is the point from which everything begins.
Within it, memory and transformation coexist — origin and possibility. It is a living material that holds the mark of time and of the gesture, and that through water, air, and fire continually changes nature without losing its identity.
Terrenotrie is born from this encounter.
Every work takes shape by listening to the material, letting the dialogue with the clay suggest the path. The inquiry is not about perfection of form, but about the fragile equilibrium that arises between intention and transformation.
Sculptures, objects, and installations do not seek to represent nature. They share its way of existing: growing, changing, holding memory.
Terrenotrie is the place where earth goes on telling its own story — where transformation is the only permanent condition of matter and of the human being.