Elena Damiani »Mineral Rising«

Using stone as her primary medium, Damiani redefines monumentality as modular, fragmentary, and open to change. In this exhibition, stone becomes both a record of time and a proposal for impermanence, where building and erosion coexist.

Central to the show is Strata Belt, a spine of 105 paired travertine modules. Despite its weight, it can bend, expand, or contract, evoking the folding of mountains and sedimentary layers. Earth Drill stacks diagonally cut cylinders into a helical form, recalling industrial tools, biological spirals, and the act of excavation.

In Models after Noguchi’s Shrine of Aphrodite, three compact stone structures open like triptychs to reveal smaller, polished stone elements that can be rotated in place. Drawing from the morphology of breccia formations, where disparate stone fragments are embedded in a finer matrix, the works embody both cohesion and fracture, movement and stillness.

This tension between natural force and structural language also shapes the two new pieces from the Unfoldings series. Drawing inspiration from Donald Judd’s serial geometries, these wall-based sculptures stage a quiet interplay between mass and reflection. Carved travertine boxes hold slanted copper planes that reflect fractured rock surfaces within. These internal reliefs, hand-split and raw, bring instability into the logic of the cube, allowing light and stone to perform an ongoing, mirrored transformation.

Laminas is a new series of watercolour collages on hand-painted Kawanaka paper, cut into thin strips and arranged into patterns recalling marble veining and sedimentary layers. Delicate and fragile, these materials form structures that evoke permanence, reflecting on geological time and the forces shaping the earth’s surface.

Together, these works depict the natural world as an active, mutable system, where fragments carry the memory of rupture and reassembly. Damiani’s practice merges material research with planetary processes, underscoring that even the most immovable forms—mountains, strata, stone—are always in motion.