🌿🍄 Happy #EarthDay! 🐿🍃 “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” ― T.S. Eliot, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦 𝘓𝘢𝘯𝘥 🥀 Francesca Gabbiani’s meticulously carved paper pieces tell the story of wilderness that one finds in today’s urban texture; found in abandoned grounds and unattended interstices of the city, they are the non-places that we often ignore in our day to day urban experience. These are littered, empty lots on which brambles and weeds flourish, suffocating all that is underneath them. In Gabbiani’s delicately crafted landscapes, we witness the growth of harsh vegetation, of phyto-species that have adapted to a hostile environment, negotiating their survival with cement and depleted topsoil, in a no-man’s-land that is neither nature nor metropolis. Their effort is anarchic. Vegetal-violent. Referred to as landscapes, they are in fact descriptions of land—a very particular kind of land that either declares its extreme poverty or its (as of yet) oblivion from developers and rampant capitalism. Gabbiani’s works are labors of love, made painstakingly with a cutter and archival colored papers. This time and attention models an admiration for the resilience of a primary world that slowly manages to survive in the most inhospitable surroundings against most odds. I sense empathy for these abandoned lots, for the lives they support and the quiet, invisible will by which they persist. It is the expansion of her work, demonstrating a steady broadening and deepening of her vision, which gives us as viewers a humane and intense perspective on nature, the city, and the struggle for survival of that which we ignore. Francesca Gabbiani 𝘓𝘦𝘧𝘵𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴, 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘪 𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘮, 2015 Colored paper, ink, gouache on panel 18 x 24 in. @francesca_gabbiani #francescagabbiani #earthday2020 #natureart #laartists #laartscene #femaleartists #womenartists #collageartwork #collagework #contemporarycollage #papercollage #handcutcollage #naturelandscape #natureartwork #landscapeart #dystopia #apocalyptic #wasteland #dystopian #vegetal #tseliot #thewasteland #earthmood (at Planet Earth) https://www.instagram.com/p/B_S7Tfjlpz0/?igshid=1sh8oc645r4nr
