Rafaela de Ascanio

Carrier Bag, 2025

Medium: Glazed ceramic
Dimensions: 45 × 43 × 43 cm
Bidding opens at: €9,000

In Carrier Bag, Rafaela de Ascanio transforms the act of carrying into a ceramic form. Its rounded, vessel-like body and painted figures connect bodily presence with the material gestures of making, reflecting de Ascanio’s wider engagement with female experience, ancestral forms of labour and the knowledge embedded within them.

To carry is also to inherit. Across generations, we receive stories, gestures, cultural images, ways of working and ways of understanding our place within a community. Much of this knowledge has historically been transmitted through everyday acts of female labour – through making, holding, caring and preserving – practices that can quietly establish a sense of continuity between one generation and the next.

Within Negotiating Belonging, Carrier Bag considers belonging through this process of transmission. The vessel becomes a metaphor for what we carry with us from those who came before, while recognising that inheritance is never static. What is received can be preserved, questioned, transformed or rearranged. Belonging therefore emerges not simply from maintaining tradition, but from deciding how inherited histories and forms of knowledge continue to live within the present.

Place a pre-bid

Bidding on this work opens at €9,000.

The highest pre-bid becomes the price this work opens at on 4 October. If no one in the room bids higher, it is yours at that price.

You can also set a maximum. It stays private. If someone bids against you, we raise your bid for you, one step at a time, never above your maximum. If someone goes past it, you are out and we email you so you can bid again. On the day you can always keep bidding in the room, beyond your maximum if you wish.

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Your bid, in euros At least €9,000, the starting price for this lot. Bids go up in steps of €500. Your maximum, in euros (optional) The most we may raise you to if others bid. Only used if you are outbid; nobody sees it.

My bid is binding. If I enter a maximum, I am also bound at any amount up to it that the system raises me to when others bid. If I am still the highest bidder on 4 October and no one in the room bids more, the work is mine at that price under the Conditions of Sale.

You will see a reference number straight away and get a confirmation by email. Bids go up in fixed steps: €50 below €1,000, €100 to €2,000, €200 to €5,000, €500 to €10,000, €1,000 to €20,000, then €2,000. If two maximums are equal, the earlier bid keeps the lead and the other bidder is told at once so they can go one step higher. If someone pre-bids above you, or the room goes above you on the day, you are released and owe nothing, and we email you the moment it happens. We use your details only to process your bid and, if you win, to complete the sale. The work goes under the hammer at Negotiating Belonging, 4 October 2026, Juntos House, Ibiza.