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Grotto Girl – Exhibition Launch & Artist Residency/Community Outreach Project at MUŻA

I’m thrilled to invite you to the launch of Grotto Girl, my Artist-In-Residence and community outreach project running from 12 May to 29 June 2025 and culminating Inauguration of my exhibition and community collaboration at MUŻA – Malta’s National Community Art Museum in Valletta for a festa-style celebration of art, culture, and community opening Wednesday 11th June 2025, 6:30 PM.

Grotto Girl is a deeply personal and collaborative project that brings together clay, painting, and mixed media to explore themes of identity, memory, and belonging. As the first artist to ever activate MUŻA’s 450-year-old courtyard well as a central part of an artwork, I’ve reimagined it as a symbolic and material site of excavation—drawing out stories from beneath the surface of personal and collective histories.

The exhibition features not only a large-scale, immersive clay installation shaped by community workshops, but also a new body of my own paintings, mixed media and clay works. Together, these elements create a layered dialogue between artist and audience, past and present, individual memory and shared heritage.

Throughout the residency, I’ll been working onsite at MUŻA, leading free, hands-on clay workshops with the public. Participants will contribute sculptural forms that embody their own stories—turning the space into a living grotto that holds the echoes of many voices.

Grotto Girl is more than an exhibition—it’s a journey of reconnection, reflection, and collective expression. I’d love for you to be part of it.

📍 Follow the project and RSVP for workshops and the launch via the MUŻA Facebook Event Page

Produced in collaboration with MarieGallery5 & Art Advisory.

Supported by Heritage Malta, Gemelli Framing, Alka Ceramics, Rathenart Printing, MarieGallery5, ZamCor Media and Australian High Commission Malta.

 ABOUT MY WORK

As I create, sculpt, construct, paint, draw, print, collage or experiment in mixed media, I think of my work and process as a crystal ball conversation about life and the human condition. The unearthing of experiences, the sifting of my psyche and my emotional response to the world around me exposes a multilayered and multifaceted way of seeing and feeling, a process of realisation.

Anything can inspire me, as I work from a variety of sources conjuring portraits, landscapes or objects working in diverse mediums and approaches that intersect with art history and culture. I delve into the unknown, into memories and lived experiences in search of a more poetic understanding of the universe. My adventure, a magical mystery tour, where my angels and demons converse on topics regarding the physical, spiritual, emotional and psychological structure of things as well as life’s full spectrum of tenses, past, present and future. 

This is how approach my every day and every artwork. Some days I love it, some days I want to strangle it, kick it before it kicks me. Some days it beats me up and pummels my insides to a pulp. But I choose to carry on, I survive, I let it flow, those fragments and elements of material forming connective sinews to my thorny soul. I make art so it teaches me about my place in the world, what I am and where I am going. In turn, I wish to lure others closer to this experience of my crystal ball wonder.

Using my subconscious to discover my subterranean voice, I hone and master connections between personal and universal, life and existential themes. The resulting works, often a surreal reflection of my inner being, can appear as hybrids of shifting parts, or psychic montages and troves of ambiguity and enigma, making visible the intimate and elusive qualities of the shape of my thinking, to give form to our fragile ever-changing world. 

Explore my work >

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