Gianna Dispenza

The materials in my work are often derived from the everyday: the detritus of travel, newspaper clippings, deserted objects. But I also find archetypes endlessly intriguing: bathers at the water’s edge, for example, or the Herculean athlete. I'm interested in how these recurrent tropes thread through art, literature, and the social fabric, but especially, how their meanings reverberate differently through time. So rather than simply reiterating the symbols, motifs, and images of the past, the archetype is a way for me to engage more directly with shifting values in the present. 

The most important point, however, is that what I’ve mentioned above comes last. The fundamental constituent of my practice is feeling. I do this physically, by pushing clay with my palms, building or reducing shapes and arrangements. I do it by playing alchemist and combining wild materials. I take immeasurable pleasure in experimenting with tone and form and texture. But what I’m really referring to is non-physical. Feeling and intuition pilot all of the movement and mark-making in my practice. And so, for me, the work somehow mobilizes a gradual gathering and acquisition of positions into an action. From this point, the action, and its necessary and enduring change, can be most generative.  

Gianna Dispenza, 2020
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