Bla bla bla in the city 1 Drawing

Irene is a mixed media artist based in East London. Graduated from Central St Martin’s, she has worked creatively in several spheres – fashion; theatre; live art installations for events that include the Portobello Festival, and the H. C. Andersen Bicentenary Festival at the British Library. Irene has exhibited her work at numerous London-based events and galleries. These include Candid Art Centre, Leytonstone Artstrail, Building Bloqs, Islington Arts Factory and Orleans House Gallery. She has also exhibited work in Lisbon as part of Man Power Festival, 2015, and at Banasthali University, Jaipur, February 2011, during her term as artist-in-residence. ‘I am from Padua, Italy, where I graduated in Fashion Design Studies. My cultural and family background has given me the opportunity to develop and explore aesthetics and the appreciation of beauty in the arts. Some of my happiest moments have been, and still are, getting together with the women in my family (Hey, sometimes men get involved too) and exchanging opinions about clothes, matching colours, fabric patterns, textures, flavours and smells. However only when moving to London did the idea of making art take complete hold of me. A Hayward retrospective struck me with the wonderful possibilities suggested by Yves Klein’s work. His symbolic colour, gestures, and use of the human body as mark-maker, unleashed something inside me. I thought: ‘Wow, you can make art with anything, in any way imaginable. What freedom!’ 'Another significant moment occurred in 2007 whilst managing a cultural centre in London Bridge. Inundated with requests from artists and organisations to exhibit artworks, I encountered the Outsider Art community and began passionately promoting its art. I fell in love with its rawness, emotional intensity, and freedom from academic structure, judgement, and aesthetic rules.’ Irene mixes a variety of media to create two-dimensional artworks. Guided by thematic preoccupations, she will typically have 5-6 types of materials to hand in order to react intuitively to whatever most inspires her. Irene’s concerns range from the physical and primal to the mystical world of dreams and symbols. She is also inspired by movement- and dance-based practices. Two qualities consistently evident in Irene’s art define her practice: rawness and a search for beauty. Her work constantly explores the tensions between the two.