Your artistic production is very diversified, ranging from printmaking to sculpture, from book works to installations. What attracts you about these fields of art? Do they have something in common?
I work across a range of media and processes, intuitively led by the ideas that I am trying to explore. They are often interconnected so that an idea might start as sculpture but then become the source material for a series of prints. My work is very much made in the spirit of play and a curiosity to see how I can represent my ideas.
Which past and contemporary artists have most influenced you in your artistic career?
Giorgio Morandi has had a very particular and profound influence on me both in terms of his subject matter, inconsequential objects like boxes, bottles and jugs, as well as in the slow method he uses of bringing a work to completion. Marcel Duchamp has also been of great importance to me for the manner in which he placed the emphasis on the idea over that of developing a consistent style. More recently, the fluidity, risk and humour in late work of Philip Guston has been a great inspiration.
Still nature is a constant subject of your work, and the main subject of this exhibition. What do you want to communicate through it?
The Italian phrase “Natura Morta” carries with it notion of mortality and what gets left behind to represent a life lived. So it has a certain gravitas. I am drawn to the kind of still life that represents very ordinary things, often objects of little value but are things that we live with and in fact we share our lives with. In my work, I would hope to create compositions that encourage the viewer to reflect on these ideas.
Do you feel a special bond with the Italian art and public?
I have had a close relationship with the Estorick Collection over 20 years, especially for their collection of Morandi’s drawings and prints and I have shared my enthusiasm for these in many talks and catalogue essays. In 2006 I worked with the Estorick to curate Morandi’s legacy: Influences on British Art (2006) and in 2021 I exhibited my own work, made during the pandemic lockdown, alongside their Marandi’s, in A still life which featured my prints, sculptures and poems. As a consequence, I was delighted to be invited to show a larger collection of my prints in the beautiful surroundings of the Italian Cultural Institute.
