Eupnea {meaning “breathing in unison”} collective came together during the strange year of 2020, initially as a Creativity Lab and then during the pandemic lockdowns as a remote contemplative observation group. From these beginnings, the collective developed and then decided to use the Arte Laguna prize as an opportunity for a co-creative experience. Through experimentation and iteration, the group moved towards the four collective works presented here. Each collective work is composed of an original ‘catalytic’ piece by a different artist in our collective and pieces made by the other members in resonance with it.
This artistic experiment is also intended as a reflection of:
What co-creation means in our society today
How important it is to have an open mind and heart in order to understand, connect and embrace ourselves and the points of view of others so we can build on each other’s strength to better face our emotional struggle and enhance our creativity process
Catalytic piece: OBSERVING THE FEAR (by Anastasiya Berasneva) - Painting N. 2 in the combine
This painting is about my fears, my struggles, my discomfort with myself, and I know all these feelings are there and they make me sad a lot but I do not face them from inside I just look at them. Do not want to accept them, almost like creating another reality, where I know they are there but they are not mine. And even in this painting I try to create something that looks better than it feels. But no matter how much I try to hold on to my shield and my ice cover, it is cracking and hiding becomes more and more difficult.
Resonant pieces: Giorgia Madonno - Painting N. 3 in the combine
In this artwork I felt to be in an open space, with snow and cold. I saw a person standing in front of a mountain iced lake observing the void, wanting to look inside but for some reason not doing so, maybe because the ice looks so fragile. The lake then in my mind transformed into a cloud, a bubble which could easily disappear, implode or move away. I thought that we need void, silence to go on a journey of deep reflection. My painting mirrors the same landscape, an iced mountain where instead of a lake there is a crevasse, looking a bit like a wound. I used to trek on iced mountain such as Monte Rosa in Italy and when you are in all this white and in front of the crevasse, you feel small and fragile and while walking slow in this wide open landscape you go inside yourself and your interior crevasse open up together with the joy, the mystery, the beauty of being alive and being able to witness such a beauty around and inside yourself.
Resonant pieces: Donna Chiu - Painting N. 4 in the combine
I see a lot of struggles, the wish to break through the fear to move forward in Anastasiya’s painting, and I am very captivated by this sense of internal conflict. As such, I express this internal battle in my work, with a twist in my interpretation. I create a world intersecting the internal and the external, and the eagerness to step out. At the same time, I also introduce another vintage point that is unclear if it belongs to the outsiders who are inspecting the feeling of the painter, or it belongs to the painter who is inspecting something she wants to keep a distance.
Resonant pieces: Joy Haughton - Painting N. 1 in the combine
I had an immediate feeling from the original piece of trekking through an icy landscape towards a deep lake. I wanted to capture the sense of beauty and danger this gave me in my piece. Many years ago, I worked as an archivist for the photographs of the 1914-16 Shackleton expedition to Antarctica by Frank Hurley. The original piece immediately brought to mind Hurley’s photographs and so I used one of his photographs of an Antarctic ice cave to inspire the tonality of my piece. As my entire experience with Eupnea has flirted with ideas of the ancient, it appealed to me to use one of the earliest photographs of the Antarctic as inspiration for this piece.
