At 66, Silvia Sabaini reinvents herself as a sculptor.

by Ursula Gullow . photo by Anthony Bellemare

Two years ago, a community center ceramics class changed Silvia Sabaini’s life. At the time, 66-year-old Sabaini was working with the Parrot Rescue organization in Clyde, North Carolina. She had never had any formal art training, but her daughter encouraged her to take a ceramics class at a Waynesville community center. “It was six classes for $60,” says Sabaini. “How could I go wrong?”

She was immediately gripped by what she could do with clay. Or rather, the clay somehow seemed to grip her. “Clay has its own life,” says Sabaini, who creates forms without models or photographic references. “The faces are all in the clay already. I honestly feel like it only needs my hands to bring it. It already is its own being.”

Last year, she moved closer to Asheville and set up a workspace at The Odyssey Clay Center in the River Arts District. In October 2009, a workshop by Melisa Cadell at the center inspired Sabaini to start making ceramic portraits. After a three-hour weekend demo, she bought a 25-pound bag of clay on Monday and ending up creating eight faces.

In about a year’s time, Sabaini has created more than 30 figurative sculptures, and her work caught the eye of well-known River District artist Jonas Gerard. He invited her to show her sculptures in his River Arts District gallery this month, in his first invitational show, Form Over Function.

It’s easy to see why Gerard and others are so moved. Her sometimes-creepy characters also exude grace, strength and vulnerability with their fleshy earlobes, full lips, exaggerated noses and penetrating eyes. To make them, Sabaini constructs a simple armature of wood and newspaper and then layers on slabs of clay. She treats the surfaces with a combination of underglazes, terra sigilatas, iron oxides and acrylic paints.

Growing up in Chicago, Sabaini was able to take art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago in 6th grade. But she never really pursued art. After high school, she married and spent the next 20 years raising two children. “I didn’t go to college,” she says, “College was for men.” In 1976, Sabaini and her husband moved to Washington, D.C., where she landed jobs as a portrait photographer and then an interior designer. Still, she never thought of herself as an artist. She made school costumes and Christmas cards, but little more.

She and her husband eventually divorced, and in the past year, she has started using her maiden name again. (Her married name was Tennison). In addition to the name change, working as an Asheville artist has been a wholesale identity shift for Sabaini, who seems completely enthused to have reinvented herself later in life. “Let’s put it this way,” she says, “I was a battered child and a battered adult. It was all about being kept down at that time. Now, it’s just the opposite. Now, everything is being lifted up. To that I say, ‘better late than never.’”

Check out Silvia Sabaini’s work at the show Form Over Function, which runs Nov.13- Dec 11 at Jonas Gerard Fine Art in Asheville’s River Art District.