1986 - 1989

She makes a paper happening at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York for the Holy Week Centennial Celebration. It is inaugurated in conjunction with the Johann
Sebastian Bach Cathedral Choir Concert in 1986. A video of the event is made by Abba International, NYC. It is published in The New York Times, Part 2, November 15, 1987. She completes a series ofcollages and two alabaster water sculptures, “L'Infinito” and 'The City Of Light.” Carla continues carving in alabaster and wood. She also begins work on “Woods In Bloom And Waterfalls,” a handwoven/hand-stitched silk tapestry, and the project “Marching Forest.”

In 1987, she submits again the proposal for “The Fountain With The Permanent Shadow” and a “Golden Pond” project for a public outdoor location. Both went unrealized. She does complete one silk tapestry for her own space in Tuscany, part of the “Woods In Bloom” series. She receives four private stone and bronze commissions to be installed by the fall of 1989. Photographs by Emett Bright of the Lavatelli Working Place and Sculpture Garden are published for the first time in the Architectural Digest series: “Sculptors in Their Studio.” Then she begins work on a medals project: 32 bronze medals for NEA of San Francisco. A proposal for a sculpture at sea from her early 1966 work “Un Giro Di Gabbiani,” what she considered a modern Statue of Liberty; a symbol of togetherness, peace and freedom, to be made in the South of France, pending. A proposal of an outdoor ceramic sculpture for The Fattoria of Celle in Santomato, Italy, was, also, unrealized.

She continued to search for a site for “The Fountain With A Permanent Shadow,” a project she had planned to do with her son, Carlo. This unique, daily event for the community is meant to bring people together from all over the world. To encourage living with less violence and more compassion. The derelict 16th century olive mill is now restored to life. Carla had reconstructed the walls, windows, ceilings, and floors. She built a stoneyard studio, and had created all the art, furniture, and artifacts within the house. Carla Lavatelli's Working Place is a living space for her multi-faceted art and her largest work, a live-in sculpture. This place provides a specific focus in time and place and it has been, for the last 18 years, the center of Lavatelli’s existence. It is the landscape she came to know intimately and made possible the series of “Woods In Bloom And Waterfalls,” the water sculptures incorporating rivers, wind, light and shadow. The Working Place and Sculpture Garden was opened to the public in 1988 from May 15 to October 15. Her space at 140 Thompson was opened to the public by appointment, as of November 1st, 1988. She has been out of the gallery system for the last decade and a half.