I had many studios during my lifetime where to keep waxes, clays, woods, pigments, brushes, oils, fabrics, milling machines, polishers and tools for finishing. 

Nonetheless, after many years of practice with materials, shapes and surfaces, my workplaces have been those where my hands and mind manifested themselves. 

My hands and mind are what I carry with me, a potential that manifests itself where it can: at the stone masonry, the carpentry, the foundry, the printer and in the soil which I shape digging into it, with the malleable matter in my hands, in every place, in the midst of nature or architecture. 

The studios which inevitably took turns in the course of my life have been harbours of passage. The harbours do not remain, nor the ships, but only the routes and connections they have generated. 

When I was fourteen years old, one day in Latin language class we were reading Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum and in it the story of the Greek philosopher Bias of Priene. He was asked why he was not carrying anything with him as he fled the destruction of his hometown, and he replied: “omnia mea mecum porto” (I carry all my things with me). A revelation that has marked my life!

When I started working in the digital dimension in 1993, I discovered how to go beyond my analog experience and since 2000, with the net, I just needed a terminal -computer- connected to the Internet to access my works, which from their analog dimension had become digital so that I could continue to work there: from the hand, concrete, to the mind, virtual. 

With the analog studios/workplaces I had, the same thing happened a bit. In fact, they had always been ethereal becoming concrete everywhere, according to time and need, where my hands and mind wanted to manifest and discover. 

Shape and image are at the service of a cognitive and evolutionary process, the studios, the workplace, is the persona.

Guido Dettoni della Grazia / 2020