Angela De Biase

My research:

I work with many different materials, even recycled ones, weaving and sometimes painting the textures that arise from such mixtures of different materials.

With my works, I wish to tell the story of emptiness, of the possibility we have of looking through forms, sometimes penetrating them, and identifying a fourth spatial dimension by referring to images: human, animals, objects, vegetables. 

I search for transparencies, made from woven nylon, which are crossed by air and which, like sea sponges, absorb nourishment from crossing water, in my sculptures/paintings they absorb this force from the air. 

Another point that shakes my research is the determination of the shadows that, unlike the organisms that determine them, when reflected on neutral surfaces, are filled with a grey substance, always in motion, they come alive, disappear and are reborn like the life that seems to vivify them.

I often use weavings, the places of weaving, precisely because they were next to the hearth, which I do not have, and they were also the places of storytelling, of passing on the stories of myths, of fairy tales, and consequently they were the places of the imagination, or at least of what nourished it. One can wander very far with the mind while embroidering or listening to stories… one enters an infinite inner world that is as vast as the outer world. Here, working with thread, within a kind of void of silence, I realised that this great void is a very fertile state of mind for creation.

My work is a continuous focus on taking in, picking out, selecting, identifying every possible trace of experience that contains within itself a potential for mobility. I study transparencies, I am interested in emptiness, equal to our state of individuals almost completely emptied of their identity. We are all the same and at the same time unrecognisable even to ourselves.  

Even the smallest particle of matter that enters my work enters it because it had something in it that predisposed it to this ‘belonging’, to movement, to participating. 

My doing consists of manipulating the material with my hands. The manipulation responds to the indications within the materials. For me, the design of the work is a continuous interrogation with the desire for the work.

I ask at the same time that I am responding. 

I feel art as a movement that I need to have, incessant and always alive, gratifying. The various individual choices, each act, the most minute selections, the different materials, can only be sustained by a positive tension. Of course, I am very interested in the end result, but to arrive at my ‘special’ result, the process is also important.

The project is in the process. There is a point at which the work is given to me, it has come out of my ‘hands’, it is there, and I can recognise it as made and born.

Angela De Biase