Film, edit and text by Alex Schuchmann
It was brutally hot the day we arrived in Carrara, the kind of heat that presses down on you the second you step outside, and the crickets were going off so loud they nearly drowned out conversation. It wasn't until the next day, walking to the studio with Irena, that we first heard the chisels ringing off marble. That's where we found ourselves for the second Hometown Journal film shot in Italy, and the first to follow a stone carving sculptor: two days in the studio of Irena Posner, a British artist living and working at the foot of the white marble mountains.
Her studio might be the coolest space we've ever filmed in, marble dust in the air, half-finished forms everywhere you look, and those mountains (the same ones that supplied Michelangelo) rising up right outside the window. Up close they're a strange, almost grim sight too — great white gashes cut into the rock face, generations of quarrying that have hollowed the mountains out from the inside. Beautiful and violent at once. It was enough to inspire us to pick up a chisel ourselves.
Between takes there were long meals, river baths to wash off the Tuscan summer heat, and more than a little local wine — which, as always, loosened tongues and pulled out some great stories. This one has all of it.
The full film lands is out now, and comes with music by the Italian musician Francesca Guccione. Edited again by our dear Isabella Sherwani-Keeling.
You can learn more about Irena Posner on her Instagram.
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