Ritualia: A Group Show in Rome

 Early this September, I left for an almost 7-week stay in one of my favourite places in the world: Rome. I was one of three participants in a 5-week residency with C.R.E.T.A. Rome, an educational organization in the historic centre of Rome hosting international participants.

The work I did in my 5 weeks in the studio was not what I had anticipated.  Through a complex series of developing events in the city and in the world, I was feeling strangely melancholic while also incredibly excited to have so much time to explore that museum of a city. What I made in the studio served as a holdfast connecting me to an inner solidity, a psychologically safe place where I could know in my being that some things in the world were still stable and constant. 

These pieces are maquettes of a larger series of works in the planning stages. They are fragile, sculptural, organic, mixed media pieces modelled on the idea of the holdfast in marine life, where a tenuous hold on an equally tenuous anchor makes life possible for some marine life.