Angela Cavalieri
Angela Cavalieri was born in Australia after her parents emigrated from Italy in the 1950s. From 1981 to 1983, she studied visual arts at the Victorian College of the Arts and has since exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas. Cavalieri has participated in various artist residencies, including programs in Hong Kong, Rome, Venice, and Barcelona. Most recently, in 2017, she participated in the Translation Festival at the University of Exeter in the UK, as well as a residency and exhibition organized by the Hong Kong Open Printshop, Jockey Club Creative Arts Center, Hong Kong. Cavalieri has been awarded several art prizes, including the Libris Artist Book Award in 2016 and a Creative Fellowship from the State Library Victoria in 2012. Her works are held in various major public institutions.
Angela Cavalieri explores the art of writing in visual form. In her large-scale hand printed linocuts, literary and historical narratives manifest as images. Sources include poetry, music, and inscriptions on public buildings. Fragments of narratives and experiences take shape in the enlarged, broken, and repaired text. Seeing the text as an image, Cavalieri re-writes that part of history by re-working and integrating the text into forms that reinforce its physical and material presence. In her works, the narrative is constantly changing and rediscovering itself and new narratives appear.
“With letters we make words and from words we create stories.
Stories are written. They tell a tale.
These tales tell about people, cities, experiences, histories and the imagination.
I want to use these words to write my own tales”
– Angela Cavalieri
Tell tales (2010) takes on the form of a "narrative" landscape made up of four profiles of some of Cavalieri's favorite Italian writers: Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Luigi Pirandello, and Italo Calvino. For this piece, she used text from La Vita Nuova, The Decameron, Six Characters in Search of an Author and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, works that collectively span the past five hundred years of Italian literature. With their heads tilted back, their chattering words bump and dovetail permeating the skyline with their stories.
