Di Fiore's 2003 Statement

I love glass in its wide variety and shapes.
I express myself with it completely.
I know it, I can feel it as it easily works with me,
and treat it with full respect.
It talks to me in a language that exists only in itself.

Glass and Wood are deeply bound. Wood… Fire… Glass...
Wooded landscape images created inside wooden items which are no longer in use.
This is my work: illusions of eternity. Virtual places.
Trying to preserve what’s constantly changing, what my eyes see in fragments of time.
But, is it true, and what is reality?
I am not certain that my senses tell the truth, that my memory is “real”; but I feel, my emotions...
I think they are true since they are true to my soul.

When I enclose with glass and into glass a “real” and recognizable place of our World,
I flatter myself, of my capability to transfer the same emotion I felt there to those who will see it with their own eyes.
Did the place exist? Does it still exist?

The tree from which the wood came doesn’t exist anymore.
But the life it had still moves me.
Fragile, beloved places, in continuing transformation,
ever lasting, but “in danger” at the same time.
Sacrificial items, belonging to killed trees, lost and unknown pieces of wood.

My work is an offering.
It is cases and shrines of what we are loosing,
because we take them for granted and of what I believe deeply human: emotions, illusions, hopes and the incredible destructive power of our indifference.

Glass is a material without borders (because Light can cross it as it is the source of our every visual “cognition”), like our minds, like our hearts.