Antonino Spoto

The healing power of ceramics

• Antonino is a doctor as well as a ceramicist
• An art history course led him to ceramics
• His objects draw on his work in pain management

Antonino Spoto is an anaesthesiologist who, for the past 30 years, has specialised in pain management therapy. “I deal with the terminally ill, and I opened a centre dedicated to palliative care in the region of Charleroi, where I live. This is my main occupation,” he says. His passion for ceramics developed later, but he became so engrossed that he devoted all his free time to this craft, becoming increasingly proficient. “I have always loved art, and it has always been part of my life, but for many years I tackled it in a rather ‘primitive’ way. Then one day I decided to enroll in an art history course at the Academy in Charleroi. Those theoretical courses instilled a desire to create things with my own hands.”

Interview

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©Chloé Spoto

How did you discover ceramics?

My professor at the Academy recommended that I talk with Marc Feulien, an exceptional master ceramicist who guides his students to turn to art to open their minds. So I started following his classes, and later learned to work on the lathe with an Italian craftsman called Antonio Lampecco.

How does your work with ceramics relate to being a doctor?

I believe that my profession as a doctor has exposed me to many aspects of life: loss, bereavement, eternity. And I hope this is reflected in my ceramics work. I feel that my life as a witness of pain and death helps me in this craft, it gives me the energy to work.

You say you are inspired by serenity and eternity. In what way?

In the sense that they seem to stop time and embrace another dimension. If you look at the ceramics I produce, they are never closed. There is always a small opening at the centre, barely noticeable to the naked eye, which represents eternity.

Your objects are in fact full of colour and life...

Yes, colour is very important to me. Perhaps due to the sun of Sicily, which is the island where I was born and where I spent my childhood. Colour is important because it talks its own language. At the moment, I work a lot with orange and blue.

Antonino Spoto is an expert artisan: he began his career in 2008

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