I work in a wide range of mediums and formats from painting to sewn sculptures, while also creating installations, sculptures, video and photographic works, and live performances. I am interested in the physical nature of various materials that relate back to the domestic environment, such as bread dough, bed sheets, and fresh produce, and the labor processes used when working with these materials. The ephemeral nature of some domestic materials I use create limitations and challenges that reflect back onto our own (in particular their life cycle) as a container of flesh and blood navigating the world within a limited time frame. I am also interested in the metaphor of the bed being a stage for life’s failures and successes; a stage for the creation of life, a stage for the exit from life that is death, the pleasure the physical body experiences with others and the comfort it provides when all else fails in life.

My practice embraces the challenge of presenting materials that are heavily associated and identified with the domestic environment, by placing it within a new context and attempting to remove any connotations from its original associations. Of course my attempts fail because the materials themselves have a strong relationship to the domestic, some having been born within it, such as bread dough. I see this as a similar battle to my position in the world having been raised within a traditional immigrant family, where gender roles were clearly in place and the domestic stage was set for me to exist within it from birth, in a very particular, and expected way.

As a material focus, my interest in using bread dough within my installations, sculptures, video and photographic works, and in particular, live settings, is its life cycle. Once yeast is activated with warm water and sugar, its cells split and divide, similarly to when an egg is fertilized by sperm. There is a peak moment when dough is voluptuous, full, and ripe, just before it begins to ‘die’.

This attraction to the materiality of dough relates back to my childhood growing up within an immigrant Italian household in Australia, where dough was no foreign matter and gender roles were clearly in place. My first memory and experience of femininity and the power of creation (and potentially female desire) was watching my mother knead this soft, white, voluptuous material. Folding it over and onto itself, pushing her whole body towards it – back and forth, back and forth¬– while steering the dough with her hands, she transformed it from flour and water into our existence as a living organism, to be consumed by our bodies, via our mouths.

By observing the similarities in the life processes of dough and my own body – the way it moves, the way it feels, the way it is observed by others, the way it is perceived by the self, its temporal relationship to the world & to others – I attempt to translate the complexities associated with my own experience of being female, my relationship to my own body and those that I desire, female heterosexuality, desire, erotica, intimacy, and aging, through an interdisciplinary artistic dialogue.