Get to know our craftspeople
reflect to create…
Think to do
Get involved
Sorelle Ariu
The laboratory was set up in 2001 with the creation of AriuCeramiche, the small craft shop in the historic centre of Cagliari. For over twenty years they have been making ceramic products. With the unmistakable passion and the desire to look for new stimuli, they began to study an object – the sheep – a symbol of tradition and innovation.
This is how the sheep with the current features and dimensions (from h7.5cm up to h50cm) was created, made entirely by hand in pyrex clay, decorated by engraving on overlapping engobes, and with the characteristic curl that symbolises the laboratory. Through a careful and continuous design, they still try to develop the initial designs trying to go beyond the boundaries of the ordinary.
The proportions change, but not the workmanship, nor the decorative techniques.
In 2012, Bixinau was created as the workshop’s latest project, a three-dimensional story to homage all women: aunts, grandmothers and young girls who bring life to the streets and alleys of the town, with their smiles, their movements, their presence.
A tribute to life that finds form in the fireclay, which is worked, once again, entirely by hand, without the use of colour, strictly in black and white, to allow only for the essence of the gesture.
Bixinau could be translated with the term “neighbourhood” but this does not convey the concept of extended family that ‘Is Bixiasa’ (the women) represented. The housewives, awake from morning to dawn, met at different times of the day, as if in their living room, to exchange opinions, recipes, to gossip about their husbands or about the neighbour girl, who had the misfortune of being absent at the moment.
“Each of our women represents a different sound of Su Bixinau”
