About

Isabella Pitisci, was born in 1969 and died in 2013. She began exhibiting work from the very beginning of her photography degree at Camberwell College of Arts in 2004. Her creative career spans a series of solo and group exhibitions that took place in various locations, from the Frieze Art Fair, Morley Gallery, Central Space, The Royal Institution of Great Britain, Flat Time House and Martello St Studios, to The Gallery Ipswich and Bury St Edmonds Art Gallery. Concerned with exploring the phenomenological experience of her viewers, Pitisci’s site-specific installations in Queens Wood, London and St Marys-at-the-Quay, Ipswich are particularly prominent in her creative oeuvre. Recognised for her creative endeavours Pitisci was presented with two separate professional development awards, one funded by the Royal Female School of Art Foundation associated with Morley College, and another from London College of Communication for her Media Design.

Keen to share her experiences and knowledge with others, Pitisci studied a PGCE and began teaching art students at Suffolk School of Arts in 2009, whilst also nurturing her own photography practice.

Isabella Pitisci’s life was cut short by her untimely death in 2013, this website serves to celebrate and memorise her creative excellence.

About her Work

Pitisci worked with a desire to collapse the boundaries between image and object. In a quest for material representation and re-embodiment, her work aimed to exhibit the objectness of both the apparatus of the image, and the image itself.

The material on which the image is printed serves as a symbolic dimension in Pitisci’s work, encouraging us to see the image as an object, Pitisci flooded her images with concepts by experimenting with the positioning of the image and the apparatus in a three-dimensional space. From the physical traces and index of time, scratches and dust, through to the uncanny physical absence of the image itself, her work draws out an images physical connection with the material world.

The work is thematically and formally pensive and self-reflexive. The tropes it explores pertain to the archive, and the form of her work becomes a language describing an idea, or rather, to be truer to the spirit of the work, it is through its very materiality that the work acquires meaning. Pitisci seduces the viewer into a phenomenological experience with the object. The work has a life of its own and the viewer is invited to let the object mirror their sensibility and their own desires. After all, ‘it is the object which thinks us’.

If you wish to know more, please contact Rachida Mokhtari.



mokhtahari@googlemail.com

Nouvelles d’ici et d’ailleurs



Furthering her investigations into the re/dematerialisation of the object, this piece titled ‘Nouvelles d’ici et d’ailleurs’ (News from here and elsewhere) explores how the ‘ready made’ artwork carries its own symbolic weight and how that can be altered with changing circumstances. Pitisci was keen to find an object that was already loaded with symbolism and to then throw it into a completely new light by changing the circumstances around the object. Pitisci chose to collect leaves from the gardens of 24 alleged terrorists across the UK and created photograms of them. At first appearance they have a delicate nature, and presumably a viewer could attach their own pre-existing cultural symbolism to the image. However with the name and address of the alleged terrorist written underneath, they appear more like mug shots. One is forced to see the forensic quality of the leaf, as it was a fingerprint. The beauty of nature weighs heavily in the mind when the delicate leaf is juxtaposed with the idea of an act of evil; terrorism is ‘against nature’.

Pitisci sees the dematerialisation of the object (the leaf) occurring through the action of light on photographic paper when making the photograms. The rematerialisation takes place through the printing of the photograms. This process makes reference to the significance of archiving, another interest of Pitisci’s. Many artists do not collect objects commonly considered exceptional […] but they collect the trivial that becomes exceptional in a collection’. This is a statement made by Matthias Winzen in his text ‘Deep Storage. Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art’. This concept is integral to Pitisci’s work with found objects, which were often photographs originally.