Wabi Sabi Studio by Manuela Metra – A Space of Presence, Silence, and Sensitive Chaos
Manuela Metra’s Atelier in Milan is an extension of an inner space made available for artistic research and practice.It is a place where a profound process of knowing through art unfolds, guided by an organic method that views the creative act as a meditative discipline: a path of sensory purification first, and of healing and spiritual nourishment thereafter.
Within this perimeter of silence, the work is anchored to stable external elements grounded in truth—the consistency of raw clay, the activation of color, the variability of natural light, and the cyclical nature of seasons—rooted, that is, in the truth of matter. Aligning with the methodological lessons of masters like Giorgio Morandi, in his obsessive and contemplative investigation of form through time, and Park Seo-Bo, where meditation and emptying actively inform every single trace, the Atelier embraces making as a process of subtraction. Painting and clay sculpture reject decoration, excluding the superfluous to achieve the poetry of essential forms within a minimalist, Shibui and Wabi Sabi aesthetic.
The Atelier stands as a space for mindful creation. Through the indissoluble intertwining of meditation, the Mindfulness protocol (MBSR), the plastic manipulation of earth, and the listening to color, the gesture becomes pure listening. It welcomes impermanence, the crack, and the void as living sources of an original, pre-conceptual purity and harmony. From the ancient techniques of Japanese tradition to the Haiku collection, extending to individual Wabi Sabi mentoring paths and commissioned works, the space offers a transformative experience where art firmly establishes itself as a healing process.
Wabi Sabi Studio in Milan: industrial Kintsugi and Japanese tradition incorporating the new
The Wabi Sabi Studio of Manuela Metra is located in Milan, at Via Privata Cascia 6, within an important industrial redevelopment project. The project was designed by m&a_mutti & architects for the former production site now known as Cascia 6.
The building, constructed in the 1970s as a multi-story factory, underwent a mindful and precise architectural conversion. Rather than demolishing, architect Mutti’s vision chose to enhance the existing structure, keeping volumes, load capacities, raw surfaces, and industrial materials clearly legible. This choice deeply reflects the idea of an authentic, embodied Wabi Sabi: not creating a space from scratch, but integrating the new into the memory of the place, merging past and present through essential interventions, like an architectural Kintsugi.
Here, architecture through subtraction makes room for raw matter and light. Honest surfaces, concrete, and the traces of time become a living part of the loft’s identity. The northern exposure generates a constant, diffused natural light—a gentle brightness that values shadow and caresses surfaces, establishing a profound dialogue between the Japanese aesthetics of chiaroscuro and Northern European rigor. In this equilibrium, the truth of matter reveals itself without ever being paraded.
Thus, the Atelier stands as a center for contemporary visual research where industrial archaeology and Eastern philosophy coexist. The space holds no decorative purpose; instead, it constitutes the physical and mental perimeter where informal painting, clay sculpture, and fine art photography are enacted as a unified healing process, self-discipline, and philosophical inquiry. Here, tradition is not replicated: it is assimilated, transformed, and made alive in the present through the artist’s multidisciplinary gesture.
Manuela Metra is a contemporary visual artist and Wabi-Sabi ceramic artist, graduated from the San Luca Academy of Fine Arts. For more than twenty-five years, she has developed an artistic practice that explores the visceral power of matter through contemporary sculpture, Zen aesthetics, and transformative processes. Her work is shaped using natural stoneware, wild clay, and pigments prepared by hand.
She is the founder of Celadon – Wabi Sabi Academy, a space devoted to the study of ceramics, material experimentation, and the exploration of the relationship between earth, water, and form.
