Suiseki 04 (Suiseki Series), Caterina Roppo, 2025, sculpture, 145 x 114 x 80 cm. / 57 x 44 x 31 in.

Caterina Roppo: Sculpting Memory, Trauma, and Transformation

December 15, 2025 Gavin Coates

Featured image: Suiseki 04 (Suiseki Series), Caterina Roppo, 2025, sculpture, 145 x 114 x 80 cm. / 57 x 44 x 31 in.

Caterina Roppo’s practice merges sculpture, textile, and mixed media into visceral meditations on trauma, memory, and the slow labor of self-reconstruction.

Caterina Roppo creates sculptural and textile works exploring trauma, memory, and transformation through tactile materials and spiritually resonant forms.

Her works inhabit the border between the corporeal and the symbolic, where matter becomes a site of psychic dialogue. Memoria 01, Adentro 01, and Spolia 01 explore the tension between fragility and resilience, inviting viewers into intimate encounters with embodiment, healing, and spiritual emergence.

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Memoria 01 (in Carnazione series), Caterina Roppo, 2025, sculpture, 133 x 30 x 24 cm. / 52 x 11 x 9 in.

Memoria 01 stands like a suspended relic, an irregular, red stone-like form perched on a slender black armature. Despite its weighty appearance, the sculpture feels strangely weightless, as though caught in a moment of becoming. Roppo uses the tactile quality of the material to evoke bruised flesh, scar tissue, and the sediment of memory. The result is a ritual object: a sculptural threshold for shifting pain outward, away from the interior self and into a shared space of recognition. Its elevated position suggests a kind of ascension, framing trauma not as a wound to hide but as a transformed, externalized artifact of survival.

Adentro 01 (Adentro Series), Caterina Roppo, 2023, mixed media, 108 x 120 x 8 cm. / 42 x 47 x 3 in.

Adentro 01 is woven from trayma textile, plant fibers, watercolor, ink, and wax, materials that breathe, absorb, and hold memory. At its center lies a faintly curled, fetal form, sheltered within layers of fabric that mimic the logic of the womb. Roppo positions childhood vulnerability as both origin and wound, turning the artwork into a site of internal return. The textured surface recalls sediment, cocoon, and protective wrap, embodying the intertwined processes of remembering and reintegration. The piece feels like an act of care, art as therapy, textile as skin, memory as something that can be held and healed.

Spolia 01(in Carnazione series), Caterina Roppo, 2025, mixed media, 176 x 70 x 15 cm. / 69 x 27 x 5 in.

In Spolia 01, Roppo pushes her inquiry into the raw edge of self-excoriation. The towering, leaf-like form, thin, translucent, and marbled with reds and greys, resembles both shed skin and exposed interiority. Mounted on a thin vertical stand, it becomes a corporeal apparition: vulnerable yet upright. The work draws on the ancient concept of spolia, the reuse of fragmented material, to frame psychological exfoliation as a necessary stripping-away. Here, memory is not soft but abrasive; healing requires confronting what must be shed. Roppo’s layering of translucency, tension, and scale transforms the sculpture into a spiritual totem of renewal.

Across these works, Roppo constructs objects that operate less as sculptures and more as embodied experiences. Memoria 01 externalizes pain, Adentro 01 nurtures inner fragility, and Spolia 01 confronts the shedding of the self. Together they form a cycle, trauma acknowledged, identity re-entered, spirit renewed. Through sensitive material choices and poetic conceptual frameworks, Roppo turns the body’s hidden processes into visible, tactile forms. Her work reminds viewers that transformation is never abstract; it is always carved, woven, and felt.

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