Take Up Space

What does it mean to take up space? I explore this as a female artist using techniques traditionally diminished to "women’s work", experimenting with larger scales & exploring migration, something that by its very nature requires taking up less space.

At the core of my work is the intention to take up space. I will do this by:

• Shining a spotlight on skills traditionally considered 'women's work' and making space for conversation about this in the fine art world.

 “It’s just a craft until a man says it’s art”- text from knitted vest by artist, Kendall Ross.

•  Taking up space in the art world as a female Australian photographer and collage artist who explores themes such as identity, family and tradition in her work.

• Weaving into my work stories of migration – an act that usually involves a feeling of needing to take up less space in order to fit in. I will use my own family photographs and keepsakes to do this.

• Through my work taking up space physically in the room. The audience may have to negotiate their way around a giant textile banner's overflowing tassel fringing that snakes around the room and coils into a human-sized anthill-like mound.

 I will:

• create a new body of photographic mixed media work for exhibition that includes wearable art, large-scale wall hangings and photographic prints;

• develop new skills by combining photography with dressmaking, crocheting and sewing, to make this new body of work. Skills I have always felt connected to through the women in my family;

• experiment with creating large-scale works - something new to my art practice.

 This is a starting point for the work I intend to create: https://www.rossannepellegrino.com/projecttakeupspace .

 

My goals are to:

• experiment and take risks combining photography with techniques traditionally considered  “women’s work’ or disregarded as “just craft”.

• open up conversations about the human experience and the power of storytelling as a tool for understanding our identity and our histories.

Informing my project - my background and its influence on my art practice:

I am a UK-based, Australian-born mixed media artist who explores themes of memory, place and identity. All through the lens of a female who grew up in 1980’s suburban Australia, raised with a mix of cultures - my mother's and father’s families immigrated to Australia from Scotland and Italy in the 1930s and 1950s - and who is now a mother to one daughter.

I am a bowerbird for art materials. Old photographs, vintage textiles and pre-loved objects are incorporated in my work using collage, embroidery and sewing.  With found photographs as my basis, I use collage on paper and now, on textiles to intervene and change the images’ original meaning. Or to create new histories and possibilities for the images' subjects. Often with women as the focus of my found imagery, I have made commentary on my observations on the changing - or unchanging - views of women's roles in society, tradition, motherhood and identity.

There were lessons intrinsically passed on through my family's immigration experiences that are apparent in my work and now a focal point in this project. Storytelling and humour were important. So was mending and making do. Collecting memories like family photographs, menus from their ship journey to Australia or holiday trinkets were all treasured documents of a new life. Assessing the cultural lay of the land and adapting accordingly were essential. This all trickled down and found its way into my artwork. Such as my use of old photos and pre-loved objects that bear the mark of those who owned them before.

Today, the need to take up space through my art – to shine a spotlight on themes otherwise diminished and encouraged to be small – feels more pressing than ever.

“Make more noise” – text on Suffragette banner by the Somerset Stitch Sisters, 2018.