Interview /Exhibtion / Malta June - October 2021
ANN DINGLI is an art and design writer with an MA in Design Criticism from the University of the Arts, London. She has worked as a freelance writer and content consultant for four years, writing remotely from London, New York and Malta since 2016. (anndingli.com)
A FLAT OF ONE’S OWN: ANN DINGLI
Two artists paint Gozo in isolation
The unpredictable events of 2020 led artists Sebastian Tanti Burlò and Lydia Cecil to a flat in Xaghra. Here they set up a studio overlooking Marsalforn valley, producing works directly inspired by the island of Gozo. Ann Dingli meets them in London to discuss their time on the island.
“W
e got all our vegetables and fruit from an organic farmer who grew everything very close by. That suddenly became a really important part of our day – that massive, beautiful delivery of gorgeous fruit and vegetables.” Sustenance through lockdown came in different formats for different people. Artists Lydia Cecil and Sebastian Tanti Burlò found theirs in work – painting their life as they created distance between themselves and the world they knew pre-lockdown. When the pandemic hit, Burlò and Cecil moved to Gozo, far away from the speed and diversity of their typical roaming lives (they met in Florence, Cecil lived briefly in Samoa, Burlò in Barcelona and back to .. Siggiewi, both now find a common home in London). “I was definitely meant to be back in London at the time,” Cecil recounts, recalling the evasive maneuvers she and Burlò navigated as a bi-national couple in the pandemic. “We just weren’t really sure of anything – whether [Seb] was going to move to London, or what. So we moved to Gozo. That was the end of September [2020], so Covid was already in full swing”. “We moved into a flat in Xaghra,” Burlò adds, “and then we were alone. Gozo was very quiet during those months, even more so than it usually is. It was a different pandemic experience. We got everything we needed – the weather was spectacular, we went on long bike rides, we ate outside”. The scene they set invites art historical allusions, recalling archetypal episodes of two artists holing themselves up in remote, picturesque homes to paint and study the choreography and texture of everyday life. Many of those through history were set in contexts of plight; wars, industrial wreckage, political oppression – the pandemic backstory to Cecil and Burlò’s hermitic escape could well be evaluated by successors with similar gravitas. What Cecil and Burlò created while in Gozo are visual records of a silent island land. Their paintings do not touch the pandemic. They record faces, the clothes on their neighbours’ bodies, trees,
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Il-Laring ta’ Leon, Sebastian Tanti Burlò, oil on canvas, 2020
No.15__ Artpaper / 017
