Naturalia et artificialia. A Sicilian Journey: Gabi Veit & Dietlind Wolf

This year’s Munich Jewellery Week provided an ideal setting for the book’s first presentation. The launch took place at the studio of Sarah Cossham, located in a courtyard of Frauenstraße. Freshly printed copies were displayed alongside a focused presentation of works by both artists, occupying the two rooms of the space. A simple table with bread, ricotta, and lemon zest completed the setting – an understated nod to Italian hospitality and a reminder that no journey through Sicily unfolds without encountering the island’s culinary richness, a presence that also resonates throughout the book.

The publication is the outcome of a four-week research trip to Sicily undertaken by Gabi Veit and Dietlind Wolf in May 2022, and it represents the most recent phase of a longer-term project developed by both. Across richly illustrated pages, the book documents a journey shaped by contrasts – between nature and culture, urban and rural environments, baroque opulence and archaic simplicity. The texts, written by the artists themselves as well as by Schnuppe von Gwinner and Paola Bassetti, reflect the project’s personal dimension and its associative mode of thinking. Together, they position the artists as careful observers, attentive to detail and capable of tracing connections that might otherwise go unnoticed. The book takes us along on the artists’ journey, which led them first to Modica for two weeks and then on to Palermo for another two. In between, they visited the baroque towns of Noto and Ragusa, walked along the coastline of Vendicari, and explored the palaces of Donnafugata and Castelluccio, the site in Ghibellina. In Palermo, it was above all the Palazzo Butera and the Monastery of Santa Caterina, but also the Ballarò market and the Orto Botanico, that captured their attention. What emerges is a compelling interplay between baroque splendor – its brilliance softened by the patina of history – and the island’s striking natural landscape. Together, these elements form a cohesive whole, a relationship already suggested in the book’s title.

A research trip, however, does not unfold without structure. Stepping away from the routines of everyday life and the studio also requires the establishment of new rhythms – ones that sustain and propel the creative process. The book outlines how, in Modica, Gabi Veit spends her days writing, reading, drawing, experimenting with wax plates, and arranging roses, while Dietlind Wolf sifts lava and photographs a wide range of subjects: oranges and lemons, legumes, lava, sand and tuff stone, salt mounds and animal skulls, fennel blossoms and leafy greens. In Palermo, Gabi Veit turns to dismantling artificial rose branches, threading petals, writing, and drawing, while Dietlind Wolf paints fabrics with found lime and captures tiles, flea market objects, and specimens from the botanical garden. At the end of each day, the two artists reconvene to review their photographs, reflect on their observations, and select images for their Instagram diary. As they note: “We spend the entire day together, seeing the same things – yet in entirely different ways.” Such exchanges highlight the potential of travelling together: encountering the same landscape through another perspective, and allowing this shift in perception to feed directly back into artistic practice. Both artists departed with specific questions in mind: Gabi Veit with her ongoing interest in the religious motif of the rosary, and Dietlind Wolf with her engagement with plant classification according to Carl von Linné. Their respective inquiries thus moved between the spheres of culture and nature. Yet travel often unfolds differently than anticipated. Initial questions may recede as new layers of curiosity emerge, and what begins as a focused search can expand into a field of multiple, unresolved inquiries. Rather than returning with clear answers, one comes back with a wealth of impressions and open questions – material that continues to unfold and, in this case, becomes embedded in the artists’ subsequent work.


Dietlind Wolf "traces“, Plate “tabula” 26.5 x 1 cm | Vase “vas” 25 x 9 cm | Bowls “catinus” 16 x 8 cm, 18 x 4 cm | stoneware, porcelain, tuff, shell, limestone, and Gabi Veit „folia“, paper, leaves and a collection of 25 pendents | 30 x 42 cm.


Back in their studios, this process of transformation began to take shape. In the year following the journey, the project materialized in three exhibitions: one in the summer of 2023 at Gefängnis Le Carceri in Caldaro, Italy, and another in the autumn at the Grassimesse in Leipzig, and the Löwenapotheke in Lübeck, Germany. The exhibition in Caldaro, housed within the architecture of a former prison now repurposed for contemporary art, presented an expansive body of work. The dimly lit rooms were filled with metal pieces, ceramics, works on paper, photographs, and textiles, interwoven with objects collected during the journey – materials that had directly informed and inspired the artistic process. At the entrance, the artists staged themselves photographically as Madonna-like figures within niches, echoing the visual language of religious iconography. This presentation resonated with the baroque opulence of Sicily, shaped by Catholicism, its rituals, and the omnipresence of popular devotion embedded within the urban fabric – in niches and recesses throughout the city – just as it echoed the island’s rich natural environment and its striking, expressive formal language. The exhibition conveyed a remarkable density of material and artistic responses generated during the four weeks on the island. It appeared to strive for an almost comprehensive reconstruction of the journey within the former prison setting – an effect shaped both by the spatial conditions and by the immediacy of the experience, which still seemed to inform the works at that stage.


"SchattenDaSein“, exhibition details of collected and made objects, Gefängnis Le Carceri in Caldaro 2023, photo: Katherina Perlongo.


By contrast, the artists’ most recent presentation in Munich took a markedly different direction –more focused and more distilled. By that point, the book had assumed the role of conveying the journey in its full breadth, while the exhibition itself operated with greater restraint. The temporal distance from the trip appears to have allowed the collected images, objects, and impressions to settle and be more thoroughly processed, resulting in a more concentrated integration within the works and their display. This shift reflects a broader pattern within artistic practice, in which processes of reduction – a focusing on what is essential – often accompany a deepening and maturation of artistic expression. Within this development, certain shifts in emphasis become visible. In the Italian exhibition, the religious dimension appeared particularly pronounced: Gabi Veit’s rosary works and Dietlind Wolf’s photographs on mirrored surfaces stood out as central elements. In Munich, by contrast, the focus shifted toward Veit’s framed works on paper –compositions of found leaves, cut and reconfigured into new forms. Interestingly, it was Wolf who initially travelled to Sicily with an interest in botanical classification, yet in these works Veit develops a language of ordering through plant forms of her own. The leaves become both material and motif: collected, altered with meticulous precision, arranged into patterns that function simultaneously as images and as a reservoir of forms. These, in turn, reappear translated into Veit’s characteristic blackened silver jewelry. On closer inspection, the connection to her well-known spoon forms becomes evident – objects defined by a body and a handle, a structure that quietly persists across different materials and scales.

The motif of the laid table, already present in earlier presentations such as in Caldaro and in Leipzig, reappears here as a display strategy. Its origins trace back to the journey itself: at the end of their stay in Modica, the artists arranged the objects they had collected over two weeks on a table, creating a first composition. In Munich, this idea is developed further, with the table primarily occupied by Dietlind Wolf’s ceramic works. Formed from materials sourced on the island, these pieces carry traces of Sicily within them. At the same time, their vertical, vessel-like forms take on an almost figurative, even spiritual presence – recalling the devotional figures found in niches throughout Sicilian cities. The works of both artists enter into a dialogue: they interact, influence one another, and draw from a shared source, yet remain distinct in their formal language. Much like the relationship between nature and culture itself, they are connected and differentiated at once. What emerges is a dynamic interplay grounded in processes of collecting, observing, and transforming – demonstrating how the same material can lead to fundamentally different artistic expressions.


"naturalia et artficialia“, exhibition details of works by Gabi Veit and Dietlind Wolf, Atelier Sarah Cossham in Munich 2026, photo: Katherina Perlongo.


The project ultimately stands as a compelling example of the productive potential of artistic exchange, demonstrating how travel, collaboration, and engagement with unfamiliar contexts can generate new perspectives and forms. Rather than emerging in isolation, artistic work appears here as the result of an ongoing interplay between inner reflection, external influence, and dialogue across disciplines, where jewelry and ceramics, metal, clay, textile and the photographic image intersect and inform one another. With the presentation in Munich and the publication of the book, the project reaches a provisional point of completion, while the book itself invites a more immediate engagement: it is a pleasure to leaf through its pages, to follow and retrace the artists’ journey, evoking memories of past travels to Sicily and inspiring new ones. In this sense, it can be understood both as an ode to the island – its richness, contrasts, and visual intensity – and as an invitation to embrace exchange, to venture beyond familiar paths, and to experience artistic processes as something shaped through movement and encounter.


Link to order the catalogue: https://www.franzlab.com/shop/naturalia-et-artificialia-a-sicilian-journey

 

About the author

Katherina Perlongo is a Berlin-based curator working at the intersection of contemporary art, craft, and design. Her practice engages with materiality, making, and the stories embedded in objects. Drawn to the tactile and the handmade, she traces the lives of objects and the people behind them. Through exhibitions and writing, she weaves connections between materials, makers, and audiences.

instagram.com/ktxlongo/
bio.site/katherinaperlongo



Credit portrait photo: Necklace by Silke Spitzer, photo: Eric Tschernow.