Adelaide Cioni’s practice is rooted in drawing and expands to spatial installations, textiles and performance. Her recent work uses space in a transformative way to enable the audience to enter the work and feel transported to a separate dimension. The images Cioni uses are natural elements, parts of the human body, or abstract decorative patterns, simple forms - stripes, triangles, circles, grids - that she paints, draws or stitches. These basic shapes that recur across nature and culture can be seen as fundamental elements. Her works are not symbolic, instead employing the rhythmic quality of mark making, akin to birdsong or music, to create a visual cadence. In this way her practice centres on the origins of drawing as a primal impulse to communicate. Using materials such as fabric, Cioni’s work emphasises tactility while colour is put forward as a pure force, so that the visitor's body is always called upon. Her works engage with a sense of lightness and of impermanence, they are often things that you can easily take off, fold up, stuff in a suitcase and go. Cioni frequently collaborates with musicians and dancers, creating performances that merge drawing, music, and movement. Here her patterns and grids form the basis for immersive elements and costumes that emphasise the body’s role in language. The body is a repeated motif, and hands in particular; those parts so often responsible for our agency in the world and our efforts, both beautiful and mundane, for connection.
Adelaide Cioni (b.1976, Bologna) lives and works between Spoleto, Italy and London, UK.