I have spent many years in Italy and wherever I am here I always feel inspired to create. Creativity exists in all aspects of my life from cooking and writing to taking photographs. I have some wonderful news to share with you all and that is that I have started to create artwork in my One Euro house since I moved here almost 2 months ago. I have not created artwork for many, many years. In 1994 I held my final exhibition for my Masters Degree in ceramics that I completed at RMIT in Melbourne. The sculptures were mainly white with some black pieces as well. For this show I cast 100's of glass bottles, everyday objects that would have been destined for the recycling bin. My intention for the exhibition was to elevate the everyday & for the viewer to hopefully see that something as mundane & ordinary as a bottle could be turned into something beautiful. I was so proud of that exhibition & I knew in my heart that I had created something quite special.
Years later I gave up making art as I was not strong enough mentally back then to be an artist. I always tried desperately to create something as profound & meaningful as my Masters Degree show & what I have learnt since then is that we can never recreate the past, we can only use it as a guide & a friend to lead us to the next step. The thought of not being able to create something as beautiful as that exhibition sent me to a very dark place that took me a long time to recover from. I am so happy to let you know that every time I walk into my house here in Mussomeli I think of art pieces that I want to create and I am now sketching every day.
There are so many beautiful remnants of a past life in my house & I have started to pay homage to the house & to the lady that lived there by placing some of the objects in arrangements on the stairs. It feels good to do this & as I went about arranging the pieces I thought of what life must have been like in this house 15 years ago before it was abandoned. I am going to continue to make these arrangements as a way of paying homage & respect to my house & to the people who used to live there.
Sending so much love to all of your artists out there, keep creating, the world needs you now more than ever.