We were sitting in the beautiful kitchen of my Italian friend. The sun was shining through the enormous kitchen window and outside the orange colors from the roofs in the medieval town was giving the scenery a very happy background. But my friend was angry and sad. Talking about the implication of love and why it’s always such an disaster and so dramatic.
Suddenly the radio spontaneously started to play the romantic song: Tell me when will you be mine, tell me quando, quando, quandaoooo!
It was too much. We both started to laugh – so absurd.
I told my friend that I would do an art piece of this moment.
And I took a cabbage leaf from the kitchen table and went to the studio.
In Italy we have a saying that goes: Oh CAVOLO; it’s like- oh hell, oh man, oh shit. I’m thinking that they use calvolo as a saying – (that means cabbage), because it’s the crap food that’s left when everything else is gone and when you have no money left.
I wanted to show that love and heart issues often become so dramatic for ourselves. But it really is everyday business. To de-dramatize it and to make it a little easier. Therefore, I wanted to create hearts of cabbage leafs. The leaf has the same structure as our human hearts. After using the leaves as a mold för ceramics. I then installed these hearts in the shape of notes on a wall. Notes for the song: Quando, quando.
Oh cavolo – was the reaction I got from my friend at the vernissage.
After this I have worked a lot with hearts, where the heart symbolizes our inner monsters. It can gives us enormous power but sometimes eats us up from within, depending on whether it’s happy or unhappy love we are feeling. And the shape and veins on the heart tells us that we are a part of nature and the love that we feel is the connection of everything and everyone on this planet.
