The Female began as a quiet pact between siblings. Two years ago, my sister Joanne and I accepted Ray Attard’s invitation to collaborate on a joint exhibition at Gemelli Art Gallery. Rather than define a concept from the outset, we allowed our practices to unfold side by side, trusting a shared thread would emerge. It did.
The Female became a meditation on embodiment, loss, strength and transformation. While our visual languages differ, this exhibition binds us as both artists and siblings navigating inner landscapes through material and gesture.
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Alongside this collaboration, I was moving through a private current of grief. On 12 August 2023, just before noon, I lost my closest friend and artistic companion, Joseph.
More than friendship, we shared a life in art. We met in the late 1990s at the Emvin Cremona Art and Design Centre and grew together in the digital medium. At a time when digital art was far from mainstream in Malta and still today often not recognised as a dignified tool or process, we consciously distanced ourselves from what we saw as aesthetic normality. We believed in the freedom of digital creation and we believed in each other more than we believed in ourselves.
Over time, our paths diverged. Joseph turned increasingly to physical materials. He encouraged me to do the same, though I held fast to the democratisation of the digital. His death shook me. In its wake, I began reworking my studio and returning to our conversations, not from duty but from love. Much of my work in this show comes from that process. I began creating unique, tactile pieces: layered, patched, marked by hand, marks Joseph would have recognised.
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This period also brought spiritual and philosophical reflection. I immersed myself in the music and teachings of Franco Battiato, whose views on death led me to In Search of the Miraculous by Pyotr Ouspenskii. The boundary between art, death and transcendence began to dissolve.
The female form became a container for these tensions. These works reflect fragments of desire, grief, nostalgia and reflection. Some were made while immersed in music, others in dialogue with artificial intelligence, an entity neither fully present nor fully absent.
An important element in this phase of processing was the work of Egon Schiele, whose art I had admired for years. His figures accompanied me in the time following Joseph’s passing, recurring in thought and feeling. Traces of his style found their way into some of the visuals I am now presenting.
My visit to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona on 5 June 2024 left a strong impression. Picasso’s radical reworkings of Las Meninas and The Pigeons resonated deeply — both in his fearless return to the same subject and in the way he handled the relationship between foreground and outdoor background.
The dynamic tension between intimate and urban layers found its way into Oltre il Bardo, Oltre il Bardo II, and Misunderstanding. One revisited subject was explored in Anaesthesia and Through the Window, while another took shape across Bossa Nova, Oltre il Bardo, and Bocca di Rosa. The exploration of form, rupture, and life’s transformations extends beyond the recurring figure by the window. This motif marks a threshold between the intimate and the social, the known and the unknown, the visible and the veiled.
The titles Oltre il Bardo and Oltre il Bardo II reference Battiato’s 2014 documentary Attraversando il Bardo: Sguardi sull’Aldilà, which draws on the Tibetan Book of the Dead to explore the liminal space between life and death. In the wake of Joseph’s passing, the concept of the bardo became a metaphor for my own process of grief and renewal. These works are meditations on impermanence and the possibility of change.
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Collage, long central to my practice, takes on new forms here. No longer confined to digital space, it extends into physical and hybrid processes. Some works are built by hand with PVA and paper. Others combine layers of AI generated imagery with tactile interventions such as scratching, drawing and oil pastel, creating a sense of tension between code and emotion. The process asks how grief reshapes form. How memory displaces time. How images and bodies are refigured.
My take on The Female is not a linear narrative. It is a fluid gathering of loss, reflection, sensuality and spirit. It is a letter to Joseph, to our shared past, to my sister and to the persistent will to create in spite of everything.
The exhibition runs from Tuesday 3 June until Saturday 21 June at Gemelli Art Gallery in Ta’ Qali.
