Our featured artist this week is Samantha Passaniti .
"My work develops from pictorial works up to pictorial sculptures or real installations realized with materials collected in nature (lands, minerals, leaves, branches, spices, plants, waxes, salt, etc.). This aspect makes my research compelling and completely open since I am aware of being only at the beginning of this continuous discovery of the world. This strong heterogeneity of shapes and materials that still characterizes what I have achieved so far, however, travels on two tracks that are always the same and stable that make the search homogeneous: the concept of site-secific and time-specific. I could consider my site-specific works because they are made with materials that I pick up directly from specific natural environments during journeys and walks. The value of the material, therefore, unlike normal artistic and industrial materials, goes beyond its purely material or medium function, bringing with it a meaning linked to the place in which it was collected and to the experience of fusion with it made by me in first person. I could also consider my works as Time-specific as they are not only linked to a particular place and to the experience with it but at the same time they can be traced back to a specific time that I live inside, to a certain existential experience that I connect to a specific work. This time does not always coincide with the moment of the collection of the material and this experience linked to a specific time in life could be a memory, an important event, an emotion or more simply an idea not necessarily connected to the natural environment but to the emotional one . It is as if internal and external dialogue and relate, as if what happens inside me is revised in nature around me and in its manifestations."
Selected artwork:
Artworks in order:
Coexistences, 2020, Intallation,(jasmine plants, wood, cotton cloth, gargano soil, mineral powder and white pigment),150x26x25cm and 80x26x25cm. The installation was created as a sort of exhortation to break through the roofs of our ivory towers where we live detached from the nature that hosts us. It is an invitation to unite, living and therefore coexisting in harmony with all the other living species that dot our planet.
Every day I am the draft of tomorrow, 2020,Handmade recycled paper with thesis drafts, naturally collected earth and mineral powders, natural pigments, 24x19cm, €516. This small piece of work made from the old draft pages of my thesis was done during the lockdown period. It describes that feeling of suspended time, almost of uselessness, where the whole world had stopped and where every day we tried to work towards a goal that we punctually postponed to a future time.
Fallen from the stars, 2020, white pigment, natural indigo blue, earths from Andalusia, pine needles and fragments from Monte Beigua, mineral dust from Monte Argentario
canvas, 100x94cm, €2300.
This painting made of natural materials was created in a particular moment of transition: it is meant to convey the feeling of displacement at times of great change, when we move from the comfort zone to facing new problems. That strange sensation of losing oneself as if falling from the stars...
Goodbye (to all the man I loved), 2020 wild narcissus flowers, earths and minerals, beeswax and soy on board, 28x20cm, €580. This work was created after the end of yet another love relation with centred men. The wild narcissus flowers found in nature symbolize these people that I wanted to symbolically say goodbye forever by submerging them in wax, which in its wake just shows a slight memory.
Resilience,2020, recovery element, rust, white pigment and succulent plant, 70x26x13cm, €1300. This sculptural work made from recycled materials describes the process of rebirth following a negative or traumatic event, just like a plant that finds the strength to flourish and grow inside an old rusty iron bent by time
www.instagram.com/sama_art_studio