AQUA: OMPHALOS

2000 | site-specific installation inside an 18th-century folly with: debris-stones from the tower, apple seeds, lime, sand, soil, rainwater | Roches Tower, Cork, Ireland

supported by: Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes, Sirius Arts Centre, Ufficio Promozione Giovani Artisti di Bologna | special thanks: Anne Boddaert, Ted Creedon, Breda and Tom Morrissey, Peter Murray, Stefanie Wilhelm



BLUE GOLD

2002 | site-specific installation with 2 channel video projection and paintings | Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland

special thanks: Peter Murray, Anne Boddaert, Roberto Daolio, Alessandro Lolli, Lisa Marzari, Adriano Baccilieri, Editrice Compositori, Ufficio Promozione Giovani Artisti di Bologna

Inside the ruin of an 18th century gothic folly on a cliff overlooking the sea, I created an installation using indigenous stones and the seeds of an apple tree. The work would change over time and be completed when the tree’s root system destroyed my original installation. I first formed a mound with stones from the tower and covered it with lime plaster. In the last phase of creating the work, it rained heavily. The rain left a drawing on the soft plaster, completely changing the sculpture’s surface. I realized my job was finished and nature had begun its work.

Cork, Ireland, 2000


Blue Gold began with OMPHALOS. A relationship emerged between the small body of water inside the tower and the sea beyond. LE VOCI DEL PAESAGGIO, 2 channel video projection, explores this visual marriage of the rainwater pool and the distant sea. At times they seem to meet, becoming one. In fusing these two worlds of water, the finite pool and the infinite sea, I created a slowly evolving cosmogony where water changes shape and color, palpitating and generating new forms that suggest a kind of mystical union.

MIRRORS, a series of stiacciato, very low relief sculpture-paintings, executed in gold leaf reinterpret the Byzantine and Renaissance tradition in a contemporary register. The works invite the viewer to enter and become part of a meditative space. Shapes laid down in an underpainting of henna and mineral pigments emerge on the surface through the gradual building up or carving away of these forms in gesso, clay and gold leaf.

Bologna, Italy, 2002