Co-founder of Studio Pescarella near Pietrasanta, Jaya was born in California, moved to Switzerland with her family as a teenager, and later lived in Hawaii where she worked in papier-mâché, lava and basalt. In 1986 she came to Carrara attracted by the marble quarries. Jaya says ‘it’s important to me that my sculptures feel alive, pulling out the aliveness in the stone, showing the absolute connection that stone has for me with life.’
At one point in the interview Jaya explains how she experiences the difference between the white marbles of Italy, Greece and China. We also hear how important it was for her to learn skills from the artisans of Pietrasanta when she first arrived.
Physics, gravity, black holes and planetary motion have long been a source of inspiration for Jaya, perhaps because of her background. As well as art, she also studied engineering, biology and botany. The theme of suspension is important to her as a metaphor for the tensions of life. In Exploded Spheres, a series of works seek to describe the release of tension. A larger scale work, Suspended Cube, shows how the tension in the cables keeps everything suspended.
Jaya enjoys creating in wax, especially in winter when she can work in front of a hot wax pot. In the process of renovating her house she hurt her hand which meant wielding a hammer and chisel on white marble was not feasible until it healed. Instead, Jaya picked up some wax and created a series of original, unique sculptures, later casting them into bronzes. She reflects on the amazingly varied forms life can take, and how strange it was to have sold one of her pieces – which looked very similar to the coronavirus – to her dentist in 2019.
We talked about lockdown, about the soothing qualities of baking bread and of meditation. Sound of One Hand Clapping references a Buddhist meditation mantra.
Jaya used to be a sailplane instructor in the Alps and there were a few occasions when eagles would fly with her. Those experiences led her to try and capture that magical feeling of soaring within her work Flying.
Jaya made Challah during the first phase of the pandemic and it references one of her favourite poems, A common woman by poet, activist, and scholar Judy Grahn. She created it as a loaf and hopes you might feel you could pull off a section of it. She finds baking a restorative process and suggests it fits well with the preoccupations of lockdown: bread being regarded as the foundation of human life – feeding yourself, your spirit, and others.
Jaya Schuerch has always been fascinated by natural phenomena. She loves all life forms - diatoms, algae, viruses and bacteria. So alive and diverse. She reminds us that we came from those forms.
Co-founder of Studio Pescarella near Pietrasanta, Jaya was born in California, moved to Switzerland with her family as a teenager, and later lived in Hawaii where she worked in papier-mâché, lava and basalt. In 1986 she came to Carrara attracted by the marble quarries. Jaya says ‘it’s important to me that my sculptures feel alive, pulling out the aliveness in the stone, showing the absolute connection that stone has for me with life.’
At one point in the interview Jaya explains how she experiences the difference between the white marbles of Italy, Greece and China. We also hear how important it was for her to learn skills from the artisans of Pietrasanta when she first arrived.
Physics, gravity, black holes and planetary motion have long been a source of inspiration for Jaya, perhaps because of her background. As well as art, she also studied engineering, biology and botany. The theme of suspension is important to her as a metaphor for the tensions of life. In Exploded Spheres, a series of works seek to describe the release of tension. A larger scale work, Suspended Cube, shows how the tension in the cables keeps everything suspended.
Jaya enjoys creating in wax, especially in winter when she can work in front of a hot wax pot. In the process of renovating her house she hurt her hand which meant wielding a hammer and chisel on white marble was not feasible until it healed. Instead, Jaya picked up some wax and created a series of original, unique sculptures, later casting them into bronzes. She reflects on the amazingly varied forms life can take, and how strange it was to have sold one of her pieces – which looked very similar to the coronavirus – to her dentist in 2019.
We talked about lockdown, about the soothing qualities of baking bread and of meditation. Sound of One Hand Clapping references a Buddhist meditation mantra.
Jaya used to be a sailplane instructor in the Alps and there were a few occasions when eagles would fly with her. Those experiences led her to try and capture that magical feeling of soaring within her work Flying.
Jaya made Challah during the first phase of the pandemic and it references one of her favourite poems, A common woman by poet, activist, and scholar Judy Grahn. She created it as a loaf and hopes you might feel you could pull off a section of it. She finds baking a restorative process and suggests it fits well with the preoccupations of lockdown: bread being regarded as the foundation of human life – feeding yourself, your spirit, and others.
A podcast where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose.
Jaya Schuerch:
I've always been fascinated by natural phenomena. I love all the life forms, the diatoms, algae, viruses, bacteria. They're all amazing forms. So various, so diverse, and so beautiful. We came from those forms.
Jaya Schuerch:
It's important to me that my sculptures feel alive. Pulling out the aliveness of the stone, showing the absolute connection that stone has for me with life. There's an inherent tension in life. All the different ways that you get pulled, all the different ways that you navigate through your life. And a lot of my pieces are about that.
Jaya Schuerch:
I think beauty is incredibly important, and I think artists' responsibility is to put objects in the world that do connect us with beauty, connect us with a deeper understanding of life.
Sarah Monk:
Hi, this is Sarah with another episode of Materially Speaking, where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose. Today, I'm meeting Jaya Schuerch, who was born in California but now lives in Italy and Switzerland. She is one of the founders of Pescarella Studios in Querceta, just outside Pietrasanta. I've met Jaya before over one of Pescarella's famous outdoor lunches, but this time she invited me inside her studio to look at her work. Here, there are tall, grey plinths with a wide display of sculptures protected by cloths and towels.
Sarah Monk:
She whips off the cloths and uncovers smooth round sculptures with raised veins in shiny black, smooth white, and a flesh colored stone with an unusual pink vein. I also saw some charred ruptured pieces from her exploding spheres series. Against one wall are shelves with small detailed models of her larger works like her suspension series. Then we go up a flight of metal stairs to a light long room, which is her office where we can sit in peace. There I see some of her little bronzes, which reflect her curiosity for viruses.
Sarah Monk:
We're in Pescarella, and I'm meeting with Jaya Schuerch. What were your first forays into art when you were little?
Jaya Schuerch:
Mud. Playing with mud. I remember very, very clearly one of my first memories. Playing with mud. You know how when you put your hand under mud, it breaks in a certain way? I remember doing that in a mud wallow, being covered from head to toe in mud, and looking up and seeing my mother backlit. It must have been the morning. She had a French bun on and it was backlit, so she had like a halo around her head. And I was supremely happy.
Jaya Schuerch:
The feeling of contentment, of happiness, my whole world was perfect. And I think I've probably tried to find that moment of contentness by making art, by making sculpture. And frankly, sculptors who work in stone were basically playing in harder mud than we did when we were kids. That's the only difference.
Sarah Monk:
We're in your studio, and you've kindly uncovered some of your gorgeous pieces.
Jaya Schuerch:
This is a series this is what I have left. I did a full series of clay spheres, and then I exploded them with firecrackers. It was a great project. I was full of a lot of tension myself, and to explode them was perfect. And there was the element of surprise.
Jaya Schuerch:
You never knew exactly what would happen. Like this one, obviously, the firecracker was not very strong.
Sarah Monk:
So that one's fairly intact. It's got a hole at the top and a bit of a a dent. Right.
Jaya Schuerch:
And this one this has two holes, so the the firecracker was much stronger, and it deformed it completely. So that was a that was a really fun project. I think a lot of my themes have to do with life. There's an inherent tension in life, and I don't mean that in a negative sense. If you have no more tension, you're dead.
Jaya Schuerch:
A dead thing doesn't carry that tension anymore. And so it's learning to live with that tension. It's learning to use that tension, learning to navigate with the tension of life, all the different ways that you get pulled, all the different ways that you navigate through your life. And a lot of my pieces are about that. The ones that I split, splitting is a is a release of tension.
Jaya Schuerch:
The the suspended ones, that one, for example, which I would love to do really big, is that that suspension again. You see the tension. You see the the pull of gravity. You see the tension on the cables.
Sarah Monk:
Can you tell me about this one?
Jaya Schuerch:
It's actually an Indian limestone. It has a yellow beige base with dark red veining in it. It's quite difficult to work because it chips rather than cut like marble. And to polish it up took quite a while. I actually did this during the lockdown at home.
Jaya Schuerch:
It's a very symmetrical piece. The idea is actually to make something like bread, where you would pull off a chunk of bread. And the idea came from a poem from Judy Grahn that was written in the seventies, I think, titled A Common Woman is as Common as a Loaf of Bread. Like bread, the common woman will rise. It's a beautiful poem, which I always loved.
Sarah Monk:
We're talking in September 2020. I was gonna ask you of how lockdown impacted impacted your work. And here we are, the first piece, looking at something you did during lockdown. And it's curious to me because so many of us started making bread in lockdown or
Jaya Schuerch:
Yes. Yes. Sour dough or Yes. Yes. Yes.
Jaya Schuerch:
I think bread is a foundation of life, really, a foundation of human life. I've gone through some very difficult periods in my life. The first one I went through, I started baking bread. And it connected me to life again. It really connected me to the importance of feeding yourself, of feeding other people, of feeding your spirit.
Jaya Schuerch:
I just think bread is really important. I don't eat a lot of it because I'm gluten intolerant. I've become gluten intolerant, unfortunately. But I do have gluten free flour and I make bread sometimes.
Sarah Monk:
And why the red streak, if I might call it that, in there? The vein, that's the word, the red vein.
Jaya Schuerch:
Is your question geological?
Sarah Monk:
Well, no, it was more emotional actually because to me, now I know what the piece is, its resonance is to you, it looks really appropriate that it has something like a human heartbeat going through it. There's something about the veining that really does look like human veins.
Jaya Schuerch:
One of the themes that I'm working on right now are veinings, pulling out the aliveness of the stone, showing the absolute connection that stone has for me with life. I think they're living things. They have a certain kind of how do I put it? It's important to me that my sculptures feel alive.
Sarah Monk:
What sort of technology do you work with? Do you work with compressors? Perhaps you don't.
Jaya Schuerch:
Oh, yes. You do. I work with anything that makes it a little easier. But in the end, it's handwork. There's no way around it, I think.
Jaya Schuerch:
There's something hard about a piece that's only been done by machines. When you work it by hand, you give it something alive. I mean, I was talking about it being important to me to show the aliveness of the stone, of the piece, of the form. I'm actually interested in what happens under the surface. How is a structure underneath?
Jaya Schuerch:
That's what gives it its aliveness. And you can't get that unless you work by hand. That attention to detail gives it a softness.
Jaya Schuerch:
This is another piece that, it's called the sound of one hand clapping.
Sarah Monk:
And what's the provenance of that? What's the story behind that?
Jaya Schuerch:
It was actually a commissioned piece, but during the beginning of the pandemic, the person disappeared. So I have no idea. I was supposed to go to Hong Kong. The person disappeared. I have no idea what happened, but I need the piece anyway now for the show, so it doesn't matter to me.
Jaya Schuerch:
The idea really was this sense of moving up, of of it's hard to explain, not necessarily praying, but the sense of connecting to the universe. And the sound of one hand clapping is a Buddhist koan, and you're supposed to meditate on what is the sound of one hand clapping. And this for me is like a picture of the sound of one hand clapping because they don't touch.
Sarah Monk:
That's so true. Yeah, I get it. It's very calming too.
Jaya Schuerch:
That's the idea.
Sarah Monk:
And strangely, here we are back at lockdown again. It's reminding me of an Namaste, which some sometimes when people are sort of looking a bit hesitant about, are we shaking hands yet? Which we're not. I do a Namaste. It looks a little like that too
Sarah Monk:
Mhmm.
Jaya Schuerch:
To me. And Namaste means I salute the godliness in you. So that's the same idea of connecting to the godliness, which you can call the godliness or the universe or the universal energy. I think you can go in many places with that.
Sarah Monk:
It's a strange year. Yeah. Is that an understatement?
Jaya Schuerch:
One way of saying it. It's the weirdest damn year ever, ever, ever. It's weird on so many different levels, I can't even say.
Sarah Monk:
Can you try? Because I'm curious, it must have impacted the influences on your work as well as the practicalities of your work.
Jaya Schuerch:
I don't know if it's influencing my work. I don't know. It's influencing my life. We're all here very used to being able to travel quite a bit. I come from California. I have friends and family in California. I travel up to Switzerland quite a bit. My partner lives in Switzerland. My shows are generally in Switzerland at this point. And having the lockdown close everything down was terrible.
Jaya Schuerch:
And it really shifts around what you realize you can do. Or what you realize how your life is set up. I find it very difficult. Do we wanna go inside?
Jaya Schuerch:
There's always a point at a piece where you really have to concentrate. And if you're working on too many pieces and you tend to avoid the difficult part, it's hard to get back into it. So you may be working on different pieces because you need a break from sanding, or you have a really hard patch, you just need a break, but you really need to get back into it and stay with the piece until you solve the problems and you get it to a place where you know it's going to work.
Jaya Schuerch:
Usually roughing out is easy. That's just work, and that I can do very quickly. And then there's a point where you're refining the piece and you need to make it work. And there's usually a time with every piece where you think this is a stupid piece, it will never work, it will never come together, it will never gel like I want it to. And why did I even think of this piece? And it's the dumbest thing I've ever done. And that's when you have to keep going.
Jaya Schuerch:
That's kind of the difference between somebody who will keep going and somebody who won't keep going, is you just have to stay with that very uncomfortable place and keep working at it. And you just take something off, a little bit off, a little bit there. You take off what's absolutely clear to take off, because you don't put things back on with with marble sculpture. And all of a sudden, you start seeing where you can go with it.
Jaya Schuerch:
I was born in California and raised there until I was 14. My father was Swiss, my mother was American. And at 14, we moved to Switzerland. We first moved to Bern and then we moved to Zurich.
Sarah Monk:
And how did you feel about that?
Jaya Schuerch:
It was interesting. Very challenging. We didn't speak German at home or Swiss German at home, so all of us had to learn the language very quickly. I enjoyed learning languages. I picked up the dialect quite quickly.
Jaya Schuerch:
You speak Swiss German on the streets. You speak high German in school, so you end up kind of learning two languages at the same time, plus French. I'm glad I did it. It was tough on the family. We were all teenagers. Three of the kids moved at the same time and the other two came to visit, They were older. And at one point, I think there were five teenagers there. It was quite difficult for my mother.
Jaya Schuerch:
Then I went back to The States, I went to university for a while, I studied art, I studied engineering, I studied biology and botany.
Sarah Monk:
You studied mechanical engineering.
Jaya Schuerch:
I wanted to make things and didn't consider really being an artist because I figured you couldn't make a living at it. I was always doing art my whole life.
Sarah Monk:
So mechanical engineering first?
Jaya Schuerch:
Yes, until I realized I really didn't want to do that. And then I went back to school for art and botany and biology.
Sarah Monk:
So that was another interest.
Jaya Schuerch:
Yes, very much so. And then I worked for artists as their assistant in Hawaii. I moved to Hawaii for a few years.
Sarah Monk:
How was that?
Jaya Schuerch:
Oh, it was wonderful. Hawaii was fantastic. It was very healing. It was very interesting. I got to know a whole different world.
Jaya Schuerch:
I got to find some peace and quiet in my mind. But it was so far away. It was a wonderful place for me at that time, but after a while, I realized I needed to get back into the world more. It was too isolated, too far away. And after that, it was kind of a springboard to coming to Italy for the first time.
Sarah Monk:
How was that?
Jaya Schuerch:
I came to see the quarries. I had seen a magazine article on the quarries in Carrara, and I had worked in stone before, but I'd never really found anywhere to learn how to do it. And I didn't really know anything about Pietrasanta. But I was in Switzerland visiting friends, and a friend of mine said, hey, I know I know a sculpture down in Pietrasanta. Let's just go.
Jaya Schuerch:
And walking around Pietrasanta, the first day I was here, within about an hour, I knew this is my next step. I didn't, however, think that I was going to stay here for so long.
Sarah Monk:
So when was that?
Jaya Schuerch:
That was in '86 was the first time I came here. I went back and packed up everything, and six months later, I was here.
Sarah Monk:
What were your choice of materials, say from Hawaii onwards? Did they change?
Jaya Schuerch:
Well, Hawaii has lava, basalt, which is very, hard. I did try to work in that a little bit. I really didn't know anything about working stone back then. At that point, I was working with artists who were working in textiles or paper mache. I was working in paper mache myself, doing a lot of drawing, doing painting, but it was mostly just checking out different materials.
Jaya Schuerch:
I'd worked in alabaster. That was the one stone that I had worked in. Alabaster is much softer than marble, much easier. But still, you can get a good sense of what it means to work in stone. I had wanted to work in harder stone, but like I said, I couldn't find anybody to teach me.
Jaya Schuerch:
So when I came here, that's when I started working in marble. I've worked in granite, limestone, which is basically call it marble. I've worked in cement, polyesters, clay, porcelain, and bronze.
Sarah Monk:
I had seen some photos of very large works, I noticed there was a Chinese marble that was white, an Italian white, and a Greek white. And I wondered if you could tell someone like me who doesn't know the difference between them. What is the different experience for you as an artist working in those three types of white marble?
Jaya Schuerch:
Well, one of the reasons Italian marble has become so famous is that it's very fine grained. The white marble has a beautiful homogenous quality that you can work in any direction. And because of the fine grain, it's quite compact and very robust. You can make fine detail. You see that in the old antique sculptures. The eyelashes practically are just amazing.
Jaya Schuerch:
Whereas the Greek stone is much coarser grained. It doesn't have the same structural integrity, so you need to be very careful in making thinner pieces. That's where the necks will break quite a bit. Arms break off.
Jaya Schuerch:
The Chinese marble is more similar to the Greek marble. It's also coarser grained. Doesn't have the same quality of whiteness, has more impurities in it. It works a little bit more quickly because it's not as compact, but you have to be more careful at the edges. And like I said, it doesn't quite have the structural integrity, so you have to design your piece taking that into consideration.
Sarah Monk:
Very good. Thank you very much. I really understood that. Bronze. You just touched on bronze there, and I have seen on your website some of your bronze pieces. Can you tell me the attraction of working with bronze?
Jaya Schuerch:
Bronze is lovely. I was working in wax, and wax is wonderfully malleable. It's a wonderful medium to work in in the winter because you're sitting there in front of a hot wax pot.
Sarah Monk:
Mhmm.
Jaya Schuerch:
And I started working in bronze. My theme at that time, which goes back to my botany and my biology background, was viruses and pollen. I did a whole series of pollen and viruses, And then a few years later, I did larger pieces that took up the same theme. I then did different patinas on them, different colors on them. And one of the pieces was about as close to a coronavirus as you can get, and that was about two years ago.
Sarah Monk:
That's weird, isn't it?
Jaya Schuerch:
Yeah. My dentist bought it last year before the corona epidemic. Every time I see her, she says, I can't believe I bought that virus from you. Slightly strange.
Sarah Monk:
It is, isn't it?
Jaya Schuerch:
Yeah.
Sarah Monk:
Gosh. Well, I guess viruses are part of the universe.
Jaya Schuerch:
Definitely. Definitely.
Jaya Schuerch:
I love all the life forms. The diatoms, algae, viruses, bacteria, they're all amazing forms. And they're all life forms. We came from those forms, basically. And they're they're all life forms that are so various, so diverse, and so beautiful.
Sarah Monk:
They've inspired work that you've done.
Jaya Schuerch:
Definitely.
Sarah Monk:
What other inspirations would you say you have?
Jaya Schuerch:
Physics.
Sarah Monk:
Gravity.
Jaya Schuerch:
Gravity.
Jaya Schuerch:
Uh-huh. Gravity, black holes, deformation of space, space time, continuum, the universe, planetary motion. That's always very fascinating. That's probably the engineering background, the physics and the engineering background. I've always been fascinated by natural phenomena.
Sarah Monk:
Looking at your work, there seem to be a few themes. One of them is suspension, which I'm seeing here in these models. Mhmm. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Jaya Schuerch:
The frame is three meters by three meters by three meters. The block inside is a meter by meter by meter. And it's suspended on cables, and it has moved to on top of a mountain in Switzerland.
Sarah Monk:
So how did suspension start? Because it's in a few of your pieces, which you did a few years back, I think. Was that a theme, a series? Did you have a a period of time when you were working on that?
Jaya Schuerch:
Yes. I was working on quite a few pieces that were suspended, working with the tension, working with gravity. I had a whole series that was called The Gravity Project. Gravity's always fascinated me because we don't really know what it is, but it informs our whole life. Without gravity, of course, we wouldn't be here.
Jaya Schuerch:
But the odd thing about gravity is you can describe it, but you can't actually say what it is. The closest you can get is say that it is a deformation of space. But what is that? Why does space deform? So it's something that's fascinated me always, and these suspended pieces come from that research.
Sarah Monk:
Continuing on the stone theme, which Pietrasanta is obviously so well known for, did you work alongside artisans at any point? Did you some people have said they've been
Jaya Schuerch:
Oh Yeah. Definitely. In the beginning, yes. I learned really everything from the artisans. What I would do is I set myself tasks such as copying or pointing up pieces, enlarging or making them smaller, and also for polishing. And then I would find the artisan who was the expert in it.
Jaya Schuerch:
And there were a lot of old guys around who were very happy to give on their information because the young Italians weren't learning it. There was nobody to give their information to. So there was a whole wave of foreigners who came to Italy at that time who learned from the artisans. And we're really the ones, the repository of that information.
Sarah Monk:
Pescarella, the studio we're sitting in that you founded or co-founded, can you tell me about that studio?
Jaya Schuerch:
I worked in a studio in Pietrasanta for a while, Cacciatore, that doesn't exist any longer. No. And then I moved out to Querceta in a group studio. That was a studio we got thrown out of in 2000, and I was really tired of moving studios. We had a group already, a pretty solid group that wanted a studio.
Jaya Schuerch:
So I found this place and decided to buy it. And then with the help of three other people, we set it up as a studio and have been running it since 2001. So it will be twenty years next year.
Sarah Monk:
There are a number of you who work here all the time, and then
Jaya Schuerch:
Yes. There's some of us permanently here, and then some people come and go. Around seven or eight people a month, maybe.
Jaya Schuerch:
This is a piece I started many years ago. I picked up again and decided to finish.
Jaya Schuerch:
It's about flying with eagles. I used to be a sailplane glider instructor, actually. And there were times I would be up in the Alps flying. And there were a few times that eagles would come fly with us. And it was a most amazing experience. It was really magical. So I wanted to do a piece that tried to capture that, that feeling, that magical feeling of soaring.
Sarah Monk:
The future?
Jaya Schuerch:
Oh, who knows where the future will take us? This is a this is a very odd period where I think a lot of things are happening at the same time, not just dealing with a pandemic, but we have extensive climate change going on, extensive political craziness, to put it one way.
Jaya Schuerch:
And I think it's very difficult to see where we're going to go. So you asked me about the future. I think beauty is incredibly important. I think without beauty, we die in terms of our spirit. And I think artists' responsibility is to put objects in the world that do connect us with beauty, connect us with a deeper understanding of life, with a deeper dimension, and also with a connection to things you can't necessarily talk about.
Jaya Schuerch:
We talk so much. We try to explain everything. And art should take you somewhere where you can't explain it anymore, where it's not important to talk about it with words. It's important to feel it. It's important to open yourself up to that different dimension. And I think it's very important for humans to have that.
Sarah Monk:
Thanks to Jaya Schuerch. You can see her work at her website, jayaSchuerch.com. And thanks to you for listening. As with all episodes, you can find photographs of the work discussed on our website, materiallyspeaking.com, or on Instagram. If you're enjoying Materially Speaking, subscribe to our newsletter on our website so we can send you news and let you know when the next episode goes live.
Sarah Monk:
And if you feel moved to leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform, we'll be delighted as that will help people find us.
Sarah Monk:
In our next episode, I'll be talking to Paris born Nicolas Bertoux, who first came to Carrara with his father, also a sculptor, who was working on a monumental piece at Henraux.
Nicolas Bertoux:
When I see all this possibility of mixing size, mixing material and put all that together to create, to invent some sculpture. This is not the image of Michelangelo carving with a chisel and a hammer. My brain is more to architecture, but my hands are more to sculpture.