For Italian-born clay artist Siglinda Scarpa, getting the job as studio manager of New York's Greenwich House Pottery was the culmination of a dream. Only a year before, in 1985, she had left Rome to take her chances in the United States.

"Life never came easy in Italy, and being a woman made it still harder" says Scarpa. "I had some bitter times,for sure. But I had good ones, too. For a while, I even had my own ceramics school. And I loved the work I was doing--functional, for the most part. But I wanted more than that. The art environment in the United States seemed to encourage taking risks and going beyond limits. Even though a lot of what is produced in that spirit is unsuccessful, the 10% that does work is wonderful, full of imagination, and possible only here. I wanted to be part of that spirit."

Scarpa's interest in art began with an experience during her youth in the north of Italy. This is how she tells it: "I remember a feeling I had in the mountains, crawling along the moraine of a Mont Blanc glacier, alone, no sound but the sharp whistle of wind, thin and pure, like the air itself. I had a sense of belonging--of belonging to everything around me, to the blue shadow of the ice, to the water of the spring, to the wind. I was aware that a cluster of crystals I found among the rocks, this stone, that first star and I were all the same; we were all equal, each with an equal right to exist and each equally beautiful. Identical planes within the crystal echoed one another, just as the star echoes the crystal itself and the stone. I realized that in perceiving the beauty of each, one perceives one's own beauty." What took shape that afternoon was more than an aesthetic insight; it was a credo, a way of looking at the world, at the universe, and at everything grand or small within it.

Her life in clay began soon after Nino Caruso provided her workspace in his studio in Rome. "Nino was just begining his career in ceramics. I can't say I thought he was a great artist then--Van Gogh was a great artist to me--but Nino was a magician, and I learned. Today, of course, a lot of people (I'm one of them) think only a handful of living ceramic artists are his equal." Scarpa also spent several years in the studio of Ugo Attardi, learning to work with bronze and wood, a circumstance with special relevance for her present work. "Clay is central to everything I do, but I've always had the urge to combine it with other materials--wood, bronze and glass, even plastic. Always, I want to experiment."

That first year in New York was one of adjustment and struggle. In the beginning she rarely touched clay. To pay the rent and buy time, she edited film for a producer of documentaries, one of those skills--"sculptural in its own way," she points out--that artists acquire along the way to learn living. In Scarpa's case, it was in the Italian film industry. (Remember Michelangelo Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point ?" She does. Every frame.) Later that year she had the rewarding experience--and all the bureaucratic frustration--of teaching street kids how to work with clay at a city-run project. It was good to feel clay again, and the kids (several with promise of becoming artists, if they could avoid prison or worse) were great.

Finally, at the urging of Cliff Mendelson, Scarpa sought out then Greenwich House director Susan Wood, and asked if she could have a job teaching and a studio where she could work. After several conversations and a close look at her slides, Wood offered her the job of studio manager, which Mendelson was giving up, some courses to teach and a large studio over the kiln room. "I worked and taught all day and evening in the pottery, and at night, upstairs, I made my own things, with the fires underneath warming my feet in winter and making the sweat drip in the summer. Many times, too tired to go home to Brooklyn on the subway after watching the kiln reach temperature and doing my own work, I fell asleep on a broken-down cot in the corner of my studio. It was paradise up there!"

The first pieces that Scarpa made in the United States were vessels. Despite all their skyscraperlike protrusions and geometric angularity, these works were still bound conceptually to the traditional characteristics of containment. But she was reaching for something else.

Scarpa describes the spring of 1988 as the period when she "broke the vessel." First the rim--stretched, thinned and twisted beyond recognition--disappeared from her work. Later, so did the foot. "If Giacometti put big feet on his slender pieces to fix them to the earth, I got rid of the foot so that mine could fly."

These pieces for her first solo exhibition in the U.S. were begun on the wheel, but their ultimate shape retained only an echo of their origin. Scarpa created a series of related curves and unexpected turns and dips that play against and with each other. Surfaces were stained in brilliant reds, yellows, oranges, greens and blues (the result of an Etruscan technique, adapted for use with contemporary materials, involving aniline dyes and hot wax).

The heart of these works was a series of 14 "creatures" (her word) based on that centuries-old Italian improvisational theater, commedia dell arte.With their bright colors ("The colors in my work are all Italy," Siglinda says, "and the Italy I carry inside me is all color.") so reminiscent of Harlequin and Pulcinella and Columbine, and with their shell-like contours, the series was inevitably called "La Commedia del mare (The Sea Comedy)."

After this show, Scarpa began to seek ways to put more time into her work. Her two years as studio manager at Greenwich House Pottery had been as exhausting as they were exciting--more than 300 students almost every day; three large gas kilns and as many electric kilns.

Then came the opportunity to serve as an artist-in-residence at the Garrison Art Center, an hour north of New York City, nestled on the east bank of the Hudson River. She would be provided with a private studio, in exchange for revitalizing the center's small pottery. Compared with Greenwich House, the challenge sounded like a vacation; she accepted. That was five years ago. Since then, she has had the satisfaction of seeing Garrison come alive, and its 100 cubic-foot kiln is firing once more. She built a new raku kiln; classes and workshops are thriving. Even solvency, a condition few not-for-profit enterprises don't dare aspire to, is not beyond reach.

Meanwhile, other shows followed. For one exhibition at Elaine Benson Gallery in nearby Bridgehampton, she produced a series of figurative pieces painted in brilliant acrylics, inspired by James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and the wondrously preposterous words with which he peopled his novel, like Lipoleum and Zephiroth and Thyacinth. Why? "I wanted to add something to that world we make to set against the sometimes desolate one we see around us," Scarpa explained.

A solo show at Greenwich House contained still further departures: new pieces in her continuing series of "bouquets" (two 6-foot ceramic stalks with specially composed music by Gregory Kramer emanating from the flowers at the tops), and human figures (two torsos in unglazed stoneware that wear their wounds like sad corsages and testify to how pain can tear you apart). Not surprisingly, several of these same pieces -- taken together, one woman's response to violence in the world -- formed the heart of a benefit exhibition in 1991 on behalf of Amnesty International. Displayed together with several of her poems (an integral part of the show), they make a powerful statement at once intensely personal and political--and thus altogether characteristic of Siglinda Scarpa.

The author Ray Anderson New York City writer teaches English as a second language and is an art consultant for Hudson River Gallery, Ossining, New York