My approach to this project was stimulated by my pictorial background and a rekindled interest in digital art and new media. In the past year I have been exploring the subject of Dis-Connection. Working in various media, from painting and sculpture to video installation, I have been interested in understanding and elaborating on how technology has changed our way of connecting with each other, and yet disconnecting us at the same time.

Technology has allowed the individual to de-centre – by this I mean be present in more than one place and one medium at any given time. Smart phones with cameras, able to capture still or moving images,are also televisions and computers and enable the individual to live in an intellectual, or visual environment that is totally independent from his physical surroundings.

With this in mind, I was also looking for something that had a playfulness about it and a simplicity that would allow the work to be read at different levels by the public.

 

I thought of a cloud: in Italian a feminine word, La nuvola. The cloud represents everything that is familiarly feminine by its very shape, the roundness, the softness, by its irregularity, transparency and maybe even by its particular smell. By introducing in the masculine presence of the cityscape something lighter, warmer, reflecting, we find balance. A bit of Yin and Yang if you wish.

But the cloud has also recently come to mean a virtual space, where digital information is stored, oddly echoing the way that in nature clouds “store” images that are in continuous mutation – a sheep, a face, a dragon.