We may speak different languages, have different cultural backgrounds but everyone knows what sadness, happiness, anger, anxiety, fear and hope mean and I think that is what great art taps into. Tapping into those feelings does not mean describing them. It means, for an artist, to take them out of themselves, passing them through their work and then to the viewer. It is difficult to explain and even more difficult to make artwork that does this. This is why I do not follow trends or think about what “ art ” is and what it isn’t because those things get in the way. Mark Rothko who is one of my favourite artists once said; “You’ve got sadness in you, I’ve got sadness in me – and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.” This is why art is a universal language, and everyone should be able to relate to some form of art. If not, then that person who is incapable of relating to anything, has a very lonely existence because humans need more than just material things to survive.
Could you tell us a bit about your latest project? In the past few weeks, I have been working on a number of works for a solo exhibition. These works also consist of a grid and this time I filled the spaces with debris collected from several building sites in my studio’s surrounding area. I came up with the idea while I was driving through a part of Malta in which I hadn’t been for some time, and I was taken aback at how much it had changed due to the extensive building going on. This reckless building is going on everywhere at the moment. Old houses are being pulled down, and virgin land cemented over to build blocks of flats with, in most cases, a total disregard for the environment and heritage. Each artwork is named after the location where the debris was collected. The exhibition title overall is “In Between Obliterations” which refers to the destruction of the past by the new which disregards the former.
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