She was born in Gubbio in 1927.

From a young age, she devoted herself to painting and drawing, later approaching sculpture through her first experiences in the ceramic workshops of Gualdo Tadino. Ceramics would become the medium through which she expressed herself for more than sixty years.

After graduating in Philosophy from the University of Urbino, she became a great scholar and woman of letters, continuing throughout her life her investigation into the human being. The thought of the American philosopher John Dewey seems to have accompanied her life and, consequently, her artistic production. Knowledge and experimentation are the crucible of every transformation; through experimentation, the possibilities of achieving new results increase, eventually leading to perfection.

In the 1950s, after moving to Rome, she experimented with three-dimensional sculptural forms enriched with thick glazes, such as Closed Form and The Red Angel (1958). She subsequently transformed these explorations into a “geometrized figurative” language, favouring two-dimensional volumes, as in the strongly relief-modelled panels Origin, Man, and Siesta (1960–61).

Her continuous experimentation, combined with her intuition, led her to shape extremely thin sheets of terracotta, soft and supple, black, energetic, metallic and bleeding, as though they had emerged from the forge of Vulcan. These works, among the most fascinating of her production, captivated, among others, Filiberto Menna, curator of her first solo exhibition at Galleria Numero in Rome in 1964.

Having exhausted her exploration of clay sheets, she returned to the geometrization of forms, this time in a volumetric dimension (1965–66), thus beginning the long and varied development of the “modules.”

Geometric forms were repeated according to organised schemes; elements were combined to create new modules, or repeatedly grouped together: “I construct basic units of a geometric nature and then carry out combinatory operations based on number and rhythm; module > structural syntax.”

Uniform and decisive glazes dominate these works, ranging from aluminium blacks to deep reds and copy-blue tones, including Sèvres blue.

The development of the module-code continued into the 1970s, when, in her investigation of form-colour, Nedda almost completely abandoned glazing and devoted herself to the study of different clay bodies, colouring them naturally. The alchemy of oxides mixed directly into the clay replaced the glazes; the uncoated earth was once again set free: “…to rediscover a lost innocence and recover the original nature of the material.”

An example of this are the “Sampling Boards,” whose coloured clay bodies bear engraved inscriptions indicating the chemical formula of their composition, whether they were fired or unfired, or the place where they were found, together with the day and time when she collected clods of earth. She would then return to her studio, mix the earth and fire it. With the “Sampling Boards of Found Earths,” Nedda expressed the “how, what and when.”

From the late 1970s onwards, the modules became increasingly simplified and were grouped into sculptural structures. Subtle, previously unused coloured earths and symbolic geometric forms came together in solemn and lyrical constructions, giving rise to works such as Homage to Ebla (1981), Akyarlar (1983), and Amphora III (1989).

A true alchemist and an innovator of techniques and languages, she combined the figure of the expert artisan with the genius of the artist. She was not a “mere” ceramist, but a fundamental sculptor in the evolution of contemporary ceramics.

A great woman of letters and educator, she was deeply committed to teaching.

Among the numerous important exhibitions and retrospectives dedicated to her, we should mention the Artistic Ceramics Competitions in Gualdo Tadino; the retrospective exhibition at the Gubbio Biennale of Ceramics in 1976, followed forty years later by another exhibition in 2016; Masters of Ceramics in Faenza, 1986; Sì Ceramica, Galleria dei Serpenti, Rome, 1989; Sculture in Villa, Villa d’Este, Tivoli, 2006; Omaggio a Nedda Guidi, Museo della Ceramica, Montelupo Fiorentino, 2013; Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture in Italy, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 2015. She also exhibited in Korea, Japan, Turkey, the United States, Australia, and Germany.

Nedda Guidi died in Rome on 13 April 2015.