Standing in front of Fiori, I almost vanish. My ensemble is a field of blossoms, and against Sofia Cacciapaglia‘s monumental Italian flowers it reads as the gentlest camouflage, woman and canvas folding into one bloom. For a moment I am not in front of the painting at all. I am inside it. Cacciapaglia paints women the way she paints gardens, larger than life and veiled in tenderness, and to stand dressed as one of her flowers is to be quietly initiated into that world.
Fiori
Sofia Cacciapaglia
Italy
The memory it stirred took me back to last November, to Riyadh, where I had the privilege of speaking at the Creative Women Forum Saudi Arabia at Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University. The theme that gathered us was simple and quietly radical: Empower, Engage, Sustain. Alongside the conversations, I attended a vernissage that presented a room of female artists from every corner of the world whose work I truly loved and wanted to share it with you ever since.
Flora
Olivia D’Aboville
Philippines
I think of Olivia d’Aboville‘s Flora, woven from Philippine abaca and recovered fibre, the fragility of the ocean rendered as something you want to reach out and touch. Of Sally Smith‘s Ghost Fish, the New Zealand sculptor who trained first as an architect and now works in bronze, coaxing presence out of absence, form out of empty space. Of Elisa Insua‘s Verde Alepi and Nero Marquina, the Argentine alchemist who builds the language of marble and gold from what the rest of us discard, beauty assembled out of excess and asking us, gently, how much is enough. Of Catherine Coady‘s Gold Fever Construction, the Australian eye turned with such clarity onto appetite, image, and the things we are sold.
Ghost Fish
Sally Smith
New Zealand
What threads them together is not a subject but a gesture. Each of these women takes the overlooked, the fragile, the thrown away, and makes it luminous. Cacciapaglia paints her gardens on humble cardboard. Insua gilds the cast off. D’Aboville lifts the sea’s distress into something delicate. The discarded becomes the centrepiece. The invisible is made to bloom.
Gold Fever
Construction
Catherine Coady
Australia
And now, months later, Art Basel has only just closed its doors, the great annual exhale of the art world, and I find myself thinking perhaps that is what the camouflage was really about. Not hiding, but belonging. To disappear into Fiori for a heartbeat is to be reminded that the most quietly powerful thing a woman can do is bloom in good company. From Riyadh to Basel, the flowers keep opening.
LoL, Sandra
Verde Alepi
Elisa Insua
Argentina
Nero Marquina
Elisa Insua
Argentina
Photos: © Sandra Bauknecht
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