Adelaide Cioni (b1976, Bologna, Italy) uses simple forms – a cross, a triangle, a circle – and repeats them to create patterns, which she paints, draws or stitches on to fabric. In her Songs series, currently on show at Mimosa House, London, and conceived during a residency at Sol LeWitt’s former studio in Spoleto, Italy, Cioni has hung linen squares throughout the ground floor space of the gallery, making the viewer an unintentional participant in a dialogue that goes beyond verbal articulation or linguistic concept, returning to some abstract, primal idea, unencumbered by association. Upstairs, large fabric works are draped over the walls and floor, creating bright, light spaces, outside our usual existence. Three costumes hang primed – one black-and-white chequered; one with blue triangles arranged to give the effect of feathers; and one with red circles and dots, incredibly visceral and suggestive of the feminine form – ready and waiting to have life breathed into them, which occurs when three dancers come to enact a series of three separate performances, or conversations, set to music by Cioni’s collaborator, Dom Bouffard. The simplicity of Cioni’s work belies its complexity.

Studio International visited Mimosa House, ahead of the exhibition opening, and spoke to Cioni about pattern, translation, collaboration and artistic inspiration.

Anna McNay: Tell me about your choice of exhibition title, Ab Ovo, which means “from the egg” or “from the very beginning”.

Adelaide Cioni: I chose it because of its meaning. My practice is very much based on drawing, and this work with patterns is to do with thinking about where drawing comes from. If you think about the decorations on ceramics found in pre-historic archaeological digs, for example, I find it amazing that we were dressed in skins with nothing to our name, but we were drawing these grids, dots and triangles. It just blows my mind. And that was probably the beginning of drawing, that very first impulse to decorate an artefact with a sign – no, sorry, not a sign, a mark. My work – and the title – are really about the origins of drawing and that visual or aesthetic relation we have to objects.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.