Parma
Clare Frances Peasnall Travel Award
(St Hugh’s Foundation for the Arts, 2022).
In the 19th century, a pavement of Renaissance floor tiles was removed from the Convent of San Paolo in Parma, Italy; their original configuration is now lost.
The unusual, secular imagery of the tiles; moral allegories, mythical creatures and images of courtly love, remain strikingly unconventional within a sacred setting.
These sketchbooks emerged from time spent within the convent’s spaces and architecture, considering the interconnection between image and object, function and decoration, the sacred and the profane.
Drawing on the quiet acts of female defiance and imagination embedded in the tiles, the Parma Sketchbooks reflect on journeys of the mind, interior worlds (past and present), and the visual pleasure, once experienced underfoot, as the nuns walked in worship and contemplation.
Works in cardboard
This series of painted cardboard artefacts reinterprets the Parma tiles through a process of layering, tearing, and reconstruction.
Using found packaging, these multi-surfaced compositions explore the interplay between paint and structure.
Part painting, part relief, these works echo the worn textures and imperfect edges of the original tiles. Simplified motifs and gestural marks evoke narrative fragments and decorative symbols — hinting at traces of calligraphic forms from unknown alphabets or emergent languages.
