Window to the courtyard

All my life I have felt pulled on two sides, as a good cuspid of detachment.

It’s not easy for me to find a balance between public and private life; for the past 6 years I’ve been a bit closed off in what I’m doing-art can be all-consuming-but today I want to take advantage of a brightening of my sky, perhaps also due to the exercise to joy I’m practicing, to open a window and tell a bit about the past and present.

When I decided in 2018 to quit what I had been doing for ten years, to devote myself to embroidery art, I thought that I would finally be able to show myself to the world in all my strangeness without being too judged: artists are not immersed in the social fabric like everyone else, artists are allowed to be different, they are eccentric people. And indeed I experienced a sense of freedom that was unknown to me until then; before this outing for those who knew me superficially I was the sociopath, or to put it in GenZ parlance the neurodivergent.

After embroidering and embroidering and embroidering, at the dawn of 2023 I met Barbara Pavan, who decided to bet on me unexpectedly, and I exposed in Sansepolcro my first contemporary embroidery, l’uomo elefante. Since then I have not stopped, and in early September I brought 7 embroideries to Umbria for a modular installation that was displayed at the entrance to the International Biennial of Contemporary Fiber Art of Valtopina, outdoors, far outside my comfort zone (thanks Barbara).

The ferment in the world of contemporary embroidery is so much and it is on the rise; there are incredible artists around doing beautiful things, a still semi-submerged world that in my sweet summer child hopes will be loved by a huge number of budding small art collectors, ordinary people who will give art to their loved ones or themselves, instead of commercial uselessness dictated by haste.

This October I started a project that I am very passionate about. I am embroidering on some photographic shots of a Neapolitan friend of mine with whom I deeply share the poetics; they are photographs of the Roman suburbs taken with a view camera at 5 a.m. on Sundays; at that moment the deserted buildings outside, have the maximum living presence of those who live there, and with the embroidery I want to express the pulsing energy they emanate through the environment that surrounds and encloses them. I will talk a little more about this in a post I will write soon.