Marita Pappa

I employ a versatile approach according to each medium’s expressive exigencies – paper, wax, ceramics, among others. My carefully selected materials subtly evoke the fragility and absence of human life. As if every piece of work acts as an effort of healing, a tender act of repair. I am drawn to light, modest, and domestic materials such as clay and papier mâché and their associations with notions of repair, the body and labour; while at the same time look forward toward the creative potential that might give dysfunctional or discarded remains new life.

The following images form a fragmented map of my final work Nacre that is going to be exhibited in Battersea South. Here you can see my inspiration behind the work as well as documentation photographs of my process. Nacre, is strong, resilient, and iridescent.

Throughout this year, I began experimenting with life casting and mould making processes and created casts of my own body and hands. At the same time, I became fascinated by the long history of bivalves, and I produced highly detailed copies of their shell. Some of them are fired to become durable, others have been left to dry and eventually decay and disappear. Experimenting across mediums, revisiting time-honoured techniques such as casting in bronze, while exploring alternative processes such as microscopic images and digital printing, my artistic body is an amalgam of the traditional and the modern, the transient and the permanent.