Chiara Briganti

I have come to painting through writing. As an academic I have written on domestic space, on the idea of home and the affects tied to it, an interest that may well have been fed by my nomadic life. The subjects that are common to both my art and writing are memory and nostalgia, or what the Welsh call ‘hiraeth’ the desire to return to a home that no longer exists, or perhaps never was, the yearning for the lost places of one’s past.

I started painting about 20 years ago as I was volunteering in an art centre for homeless people and realized for the first time that ‘safe as houses’ was really just a myth. As the idea of the taken for grantedness of homes has been increasingly eroded by the pervasiveness of images of their precariousness, houses have continued to haunt my dreams and have found their way into my paintings.

These are lived-in buildings, more often battered than pristine, in cities or wastelands, or existing only in memory, and I often return to them. Cut up, reassembled into different shapes, they become the characters in the painting, together with the figures that might very well have inhabited them.

I am drawn to abandoned places and objects, even junk off the street. Many of my paintings are precisely abo...

I am self-taught

• Marzia Frozen, Berlin 2016

• Intrecciarte Pietrasanta, Italy January 2016

• Le scuderie, Felitto, Italy, August 2016

• Solo exhibition, Clare Hall, Cambridge 9 November-27 December 2017

• Tschwaba Gallery, Pietrasanta Italy February 2018

• Solo exhibition, Civico 1, Piazza Alberica, Carrara, Italy 30 April - 15 May 2022