illuminate artspace
2009 tremont avenue, fort worth, tx
29 March 2025

For pricing / purchase inquiries please contact Brenda directly at (817) 223-6783 or bciardiello@gmail.com 

artist statement

from away is a one-day site-specific installation in a domestic garden in Fort Worth, Texas made up of a body of work created and conceptualized during my time on Deer Isle, ME at Haystack Mountain School of Craft in the summer of 2024. The work explores our constructed ideas of singularity / self by juxtaposing wildness with domestic territoriality / ownership through the use of “natural / wild” vs. “processed / man-made” materials. It questions concepts like “landscape” that encompass the erroneous assumption that humans are not a natural, cooperative part of their environment. It also points out the contradictory tendency we have to deeply define ourselves through our attachments and connections to certain “landscapes” or places.  

The title is a nod to a quaint and poetic phrase I've often heard used casually in Maine (by Mainers) to refer to non-Mainers.* This place-based work was created in collaboration with foraged natural materials and elements from gardens and landscapes that define me and my connections to place, in elusive ways, among those places are Maine, Texas, Greece, and Mexico. Creating an intentional contrast, he work is displayed on reclaimed / repurposed cinder blocks Thank you to everyone who contributed to this installation even just by allowing me to use a brick that lay forgotten in your yard for too many years.

Through repeated engagements with plants in gardens and markets in the many places I have called home, but most recently especially in Mexico City and Texas, I began to recognize plants and fruits, historically regarded as passive, traded goods and vessels for consumption, as beings with history, gender, lived realities, and agency. Used as proxies for the self in this body of work called frutos, the fruits and plants are a mysterious hybridity of simultaneous mother and child, self and other, a non-binary binary fighting to reclaim usurped identity and agency. The Spanish word frutos refers to the offspring or product of a plant, but can also be used to mean the result of something, as in “fruits of our labor.” Deracinated or uprooted and mostly migrants, fruits and plants are held, waiting, in unnatural and unfamiliar environments (pots and nurseries), pruned, picked, and arranged, and repeatedly planted and replanted - and then expected to thrive in a new place — or, worse, petulantly thrown out when they wilt. My tripod sculptures serve as easily recognizable, deceptively inoffensive foils from which to tell stories of how identity — especially for the displaced — rests precariously in relation to place and memory, how displacement, especially migration, can steal agency and selfhood, leaving only bizarrely disconnected societal norms - assumptions - in its place, how sometimes underneath beautiful arrangements and bright colors are uncomfortable and less digestible truths.

*When we first moved to Maine in 2011, I was told by my son’s pre-k teacher - a self-proclaimed Mainer - that you could only be a Mainer if your family had lived in the state consecutively for seven generations or more, otherwise you were “from away.” I found this phrase beautiful but somewhat shocking the more I thought about it. Fifteen years after leaving the state - and many encounters with it as a tourist since then - I decided to use the phrase as the name of a sculptural installation that wrestles with our contradictory relationships with indigeneity and belonging as related to place. In today’s political climate and the context of the United States’ nationalist and isolationist politics, FROM AWAY, is an invitation to ponder what exactly makes us “from” - that is, a part of - somewhere.