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Member Profile
Adam Erick Wallace by the kitchen counter during a dinner party. Adam, 2013, from the series Behind the Door © Giulia Berto, courtesy of the artist.
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2021
Christopher’s kitchen, decorated with repurposed street-found objects, The Kitchen, 2013, from the series Behind the Door © Giulia Berto, courtesy of the artist.
Thomas Pool: Can you discuss your artistic processes?
Art in the New Normal THOMAS POOL INTERVIEWS EMERGING ARTIST GIULIA BERTO ABOUT HER PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICE.
Giulia Berto: I am a private person by nature but, in a counter-intuitive way, my work stems from a desire to reflect on and explore my internal world. I depict my feelings as a way of processing them, while challenging myself in a search for meaning. I work predominantly with the medium of analogue photography, both in small and large format, while engaging with themes of love and intimacy, home, emotional displacement and identity. I am interested in all aspects of my practice; I love the materiality of my work and taking pride in printing it myself with hybrid printing techniques. I have a particular fondness for the written word and in the past few years I have started to combine images with text in the form of short poems as part of my visual language. I can’t get enough of the delicate melancholy of black and white but also need colour’s subtle tenderness; they both come in and out of my practice organically. Research is a big part of my artistic process as I develop a new project idea – it helps me to untangle and refocus my creative thinking. TP: How has the pandemic changed or influenced your photographic projects? GB: My photographic work draws from the personal, creating atmospheric imagery and meditative scenes evocative of my own feelings. Because of that, when the pandemic started, my eyes were already turned inwards. With the restrictions brought in by the new normal, I was simply forced to look, both metaphorically and physically, at places I hadn’t considered before. When I moved to Ireland, I sensed a shift in my artistic practice and I think the pandemic just highlighted a process that was already in motion for me. I believe artistic growth is taking a leap of faith and letting the process unravel naturally. Lately, I have found myself wanting to experi-
