An immersive, hands-on approach is central to Irene's creative practice, which can be seen through the way that she works in direct collaboration with the glass maestros in Murano. Developing core relationships with a creative team and working together to bring a project to completion are essential, as Irene challenges artisans to revisit their traditional modes of working and pushes them to explore new avenues for creative production.

"Could is the anagram of cloud.”

In the wordplay that permeates Irene's creative practice, the cloud as a form becomes a symbol of limitless potential. In her ongoing series "Clouds and Coulds," the artist translates ideas into a number of evocative objects that, like their namesakes, escape clear definitions of functionality and form. As sculptural objects, Irene's clouds are canvases on which the explorative and interactive nature of her creative process is captured. Their geometric subtleties echo the conditions of their production, as well as the contradictory properties of glass, which simultaneously exist as both a solid and a liquid. In doing so, her clouds convey sensations of ambiguity and possibility that confound divisions between functionality and art, artists, and artisans.

Inspired by the vast variety of cloudscapes within the natural world, Irene has evolved her practice and shifted her focus to explore alternative mediums that provide a prism through which to investigate other aspects of the classic cloud shape and provide it with a lasting physical form. Whereas in her glass work Irene emphasizes the reflective capacity of clouds, both in an abstract and in a material sense, her most recent pieces in marble and bronze explore more grounded emotions that evoke a contradictory strength and endurance. These new works have been developed in a number of internationally acclaimed workshops in Italy, including Carrara and the foundries of Pietrasanta and Murano.

"I see a challenge to make things that not only are beautiful but are also functional and structural." - Irene Cattaneo

An exploration of light, form, and space is central to each of Irene’s works, which makes it unsurprising that these qualities often extend themselves to encompass the environments her creations inhabit. Much like stage, set, or interior design, the manner in which an object is displayed becomes an integral part of the creative process for the artist. In this way, Irene is able to orchestrate evocative compositions not only with her works but through the architectures that are created around them.