Frammenti, a solo show with Thrown Contemporary, 2024

Frammenti (fragments)

Arriving at each new city,
the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had:
the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess
lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Meet Me Here, 2021

The pieces are clay collages. Made of carved fragments and reconfigured to create new perspectives. I start by meticulously making hundreds of blocks of clay. It is repetitive and precise. The blocks are painted and etched freely with no preconceived plan. I carve the drawings, cutting and tearing the clay blocks. Following firing, the fragments are arranged and rearranged, as though a search for a hidden answer. The result is elusive, and there is the suggestion that they could be rearranged once more. 

There are temples, islands, enclosures, suggestions of females forms and elements of words. They are all carved, a subtractive rather than additive process. The removal of clay referencing the carved limestone spaces of Malta, where I am from. 

The fragments are held together by bespoke welded steel plates, some wall mounted some work as stands. They can be placed both indoors and outdoors – where the metal will continue to weather and change. 

I made these pieces during a time of uncertainty. I’d been away from my home country for 20 years. I began to notice that in migrating I’d started to loose parts of my identity, and I wasn’t sure what to keep, what to accept, what to fight for, what to discard. I am from a post-colonial country, and I believe this collage process is also relevant in the post-colonial context in which we must revisit our history – one that has been shaped by others - and create a new identity from it.