biography


Elisabetta Di Maggio (Milano 1964) lives and works in  Venezia.

For many years, she has been working on a research that emphasizes two salient elements of life: the network of communications needed to transmit information and the time required for these actions to take place.

 She has been trying to exhibit the close connections among the plots, circuits, grids, structures and networks belonging to different environments, which are part of our existence and where we spend our time and our daily life.

The working method is always the same, she cuts different materials using a very sharp surgical scalpel. She works with a variety of materials, from tissue paper sheets, to small or huge vegetable leaves, soap, porcelain, and with different surfaces, including the plastered walls.

In this way her research becomes a metaphorical reflection on our human condition.

 

For many years, I have been working on a research that highlights two salient elements of life: the network of communications needed to transmit information and the time required for this action to take place.

I have been trying to show the close connections between the plots, circuits, grids, structures and networks belonging to different environments, which are part of our existence and where we spend our time and our daily life.

Talking about circuits or networks, can refer for example to the complex structure of the lymphatic vessels of the leaves, or the tracks of the subway, or even the extremely complicated shape of a nerve cell. If observed closely all of these elements, apparently far apart, have a lot of affinities and similarities instead I take my subjects from the real world starting from anthropological illustration, botanical scenes, urban planning; but also by embroidery and drawings from wallpaper and tapestries that belong to a daily home life.

My research focuses on a metaphorical reflection on our human condition as part of a whole that tends to repeat certain laws of fractal growth, from which it is difficult to itself, but at the same time provide us with a sense of motion and fertility of the world.

The working method is always the same, I cut different materials using a scalpel sharp surgeon. The materials used range from sheets of tissue paper, to small or huge vegetable leaves, soaps, porcelain and other surfaces, including the plaster of the walls.

I spend hours dissecting these materials and the results are works that tell us in how many different and particular forms Nature can metamorphize, organize and extend its patterns.