Vanitas hazel Collage

The first decades of my life were spent going back and forth between the US and Italy, living and studying between two cultures. This has deeply shaped my perception of belonging and what home actually is. It has granted me the condition of not-belonging and all it entails: a step removed from the environment I inhabit, which only half of me can ever really be part of. To make things more interesting, in the last 10 years I have added the North-East of England to the picture. I am bilingual in many ways. It’s not only a matter of language - everything gets automatically and constantly translated. Habits, rituals, social conventions, cultural subtleties, tastes, the impalpable vocabulary of gestures and expressions. Fragments, that somehow must fit together and come to terms with incessant longing. I walk the fine line, the boundary between here and there, that end up being interchangeable. The work of art, for me, is a ‘here’ always seeking to be a ‘there’. And viceversa. In the world of my collages, ‘here and there’ converse, conflict, battle, reconcile, harmonize, find a space, find a home. To tirelessly deconstruct and reconstruct an endless source of fragments, to be cut, torn, positioned, glued. A task that by its very nature is never-ending. I was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1962. I grew up in LA and New York City, and then moved to Rome. I later went back to the USA to attend University, and then back to Rome again. I spend summer months in the North-East of England. I started painting and drawing in the early 1980s. I have always loved photography, an important tool for acquiring visual ideas and learning to frame segments of the world. In the 1990s I began making collages. I find materials for my work everywhere - I cut them out of magazines and newspapers, and pick up discarded fragments. My archive now amounts to thousands of paper cutouts and scraps, but I usually know where to find what I need for a piece I’m working on. I have been conducting a Workshop in the Art of Collage for several years in Rome. In 2018 a collective exhibition including my work and the work of participants in my Collage Workshop, was held at MOLL, in Rome. I now live and work in Rome as a painter, a collagist and an art counselor.