Clara Holt is an Italian artist. She was born in 1987 and raised in Pescara, a small town on the seaside in central Italy. She attended classical studies in high school and became passionate about ancient Greek culture, literature, and mythology.
In 2006, she moved to Milan, where she attended a science university and started working for a multinational company in advertising and television production. Meanwhile, she cultivated an interest in fine art, attending illustration classes and workshops and studying printmaking at the Castello Sforzesco School of Art in Milan, working mainly with etching and aquatint techniques. In 2018, she began working on ceramics, primarily focusing, from the beginning, on making pieces centered on decoration. She devoted herself entirely to her artistic career, pursuing her personal research, experimenting with different techniques and materials and teaching decoration techniques.
Clara’s work focuses on storytelling, the ongoing impulse to tell and convey stories, characters, and experiences. She is often inspired by mythology, folk traditions, legends, and real or fantastic tales of the places she lives or explores. Her first inspiration was Greek mythology, which she has studied and delved into since childhood. Her subjects are often inspired by fairy tales and popular storytelling; the stories handed down and those full of symbols, which tell us about the most irrational, unconscious, and hidden sides of human nature.
Clara exhibited her work in Italy and abroad, participating in group exhibitions and fairs. Today, she works in her studio in Milan, often teaching ceramics courses in Italy and abroad. She also collaborates with interior designers and architectural firms on custom projects.
Visit Clara Holt’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2023-2024
Terracotta Blues, 2022
Project carried out in collaboration with Chiara Zoppei.
Because stories are intrinsically distant in time, often told orally or of which only a part is known, Clara enjoys reinterpreting and inventing them anew, playing with words and images. Here, each character is transformed into an entirely personal representation, and each work is peppered with hints of her own personal experience.
There is then an external mythology, chorally narrated and transformed over time, arising from the need to give a universal answer to the mysteries of the cosmos and life, embodying natural phenomena, historical events and states of mind in concrete and tangible figures, and linking our present as human beings with a dimension far away in time populated by beings similar to us but at the same time different, unknown and magical. And then there is a personal, more intimate mythology that layers meanings indecipherable to the outside world.
Autobiographical practice allows Clara to question her own identity, sowing symbolic clues without revealing transparent meaning. Her illustrations leave room for different interpretations, not limiting themselves to being purely decorative, but becoming the very essence of each piece.
Since 2018, she has been working primarily on ceramics, entirely covering surfaces with intricate details. The search for harmony between form, technique, materials, and illustration is an ongoing challenge for her. She tries to merge all of these to create expressive pieces that speak through each of these aspects.
