12.
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13.
Shiva Series |
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Besides admiring the living, Ettore highly esteems ancient civilizations,
which provide spiritual guidance. These antecedents collectively
hold truths of existence that surpass one human’s experiential
capacity. Ceramics are representative of this collective existence:
Ceramics are older than the Bible and Jesus Christ, older
than all the poems ever written, older than goats and cats,
older than houses, older than metals. Ceramics are as old
as mammoth teeth, the ribs of bears and reindeer antlers.
Ceramics, so ethnologists tell us, bear very well the weight
of societies, people, nations, kingdoms, sultanates and empires,
the empires of the Inca and the Maya, the Arabs, the Mongol
empires, the history of Greece, the empires of China... You
will find everything there. The whole truth.7
After
returning from a sojourn to India and recovering from a rare kidney
disease which nearly extinguished his life, Ettore designed a
series of ceramics as an offering to Shiva (12, 13, 14).*
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