Biography
Born in Germany raised in Italy, my cultural formation developed at the University of Genoa in Italy, at the London Metropolitan University in the UK, and at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California. But my academic experience could not be complete without the knowledge gathered from nature and from an itinerant lifestyle that took me from rural to urban environments in the pursuit of art and love.
For years I worked with recycled plastic bags creatively interacting with different landscapes, indoors and outdoors, forming a large body of work that has been exhibited and awarded internationally. A fellow artists of several international A.I.R. programmes such as I-Park, KIAC, Bemis, McColl, SFAI, Djerassi, Aberyswyth, Montalvo, I’m also a proud recipient of the Joan Mitchell Grant, the Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Grant, the Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award and the Pritzker Foundation Endowed Fellowship Award. Voted the Public Speaks Winner for the Broomhill National Sculpture Prize, short-listed for the BBC2 documentary School of Saatchi, judges personal favourite and commended for the British Women Artist’s Prize. A recipient of the Maryland Federation of Art Juror’s Choice, digital Art finalist for the Women United Art Movement Art Prize and digital finalist for the Amedeo Modigliani Prize, also recently the winner of the Touchlines of Fortitude Awards written words category.
Since graduating from Suzanne Lacy’s Public Practice MFA programme, my work has taken a radical feminist turn leading into the meanders of my fluid-eco-glitch-femininity.
Currently searching for possible connections between the conceptual and spiritual, I am interested in where and how these two realms meet in art.
Whilst my art practice might well be my very own emancipatory process woven into the environmental crisis, I voice myself through video, performance and interactive poetry.
My first book titled …and they lived happily ever after… was published in 2023 by Snap Collective.
Project Statement
I want to start a new bio, a new life, a new approach to my work. One that uses my own shit, “capitalizing” on my own mess, rather than on others’.
For problem solving’s sake, some sort of conflict is needed to make art. Since 2000, the environmental crisis has lent itself as topic to my practice. Was that the right approach to demonstrate my love for nature? I wonder — but I am growing into a wider, more spiritual understanding of the cosmos. So this time I want my own mess to be both the subject and the object of my work; study the landscape inside of me, the inner environment. I want to experiment with personal transformation: can it be a form of social engagement? Hence flipping things around a bit, although still in the vein of the personal is political, but also sacred. Nonetheless, environment and nature remain inherent, cardinal themes without which my art could not even exist.
Care — anything we do is to benefit selves, to conquer freedom and ultimately love. Or is it the other way around? But my reality is conditioned, limited by all social, cultural, moral, ethic and aesthetic judgments. Yes I am — uncomfortably fucking white, fifty/fifty German/Italian, both, unbearably nazi/fasci. No matter what or how, I have it in me, the fuckedupness. “It didn’t start with you”, says Mark Wolynn, so
here I am, battling, against the “trauma of white supremacy”, in Resmaa Menakem’s words, struggling with Gabor Mate’s toxic “Myth of Normal”.
I want my work to be in collaboration with my wound and with the galaxy of events that contributes to the cosmic pain. It’s a collaboration with my consciousness: a collective of voices and mysterious energies that guide my practice. Art is my safe space where I can be vulnerable and authentic and grow out of my confinement to become whole. That’s what drives my practice, to create a space for the soul — with all the elements that make the earth and the sky and the sea and me and us and more — to love.
