ELENA
LO GIUDICE

Elena Lo Giudice (b. 1981) is an Italian visual artist. Born in Hong Kong, she spent her early childhood there for five years before relocating to Singapore, where she resided for five more years. At the age of ten, she moved with her family to Umbria, Italy, where she was exposed to a different way of living. After spending nearly two decades there, she moved to The Netherlands and took a long break from exhibitions to be fully present in raising her child. In 2017 she returned to Singapore, where she currently resides and continues to create art. Her multicultural upbringing is reflected throughout her work.

When I was little, I was fascinated with Japanese washi paper (which was accessible and affordable in Singapore, where I was living in the 80’s) and used it to make all sorts of handcrafts, especially little paper dolls. I never followed the instructions that came with the packets, and this allowed me to enter a world of freedom and beauty that was like a secret place only I could access. I guess this is why paper has been always present in my practice, in one way or another. I have been drawing and painting all my life since then. I always knew I was an artist. I did not need to become one.
Through the years I have utilised a wide range of materials - and I still do - including traditional ones.

Painting and collage making, sometimes combined, allow me to layer images, change or start over without feeling any pressure on being perfect. It’s like a meditation, just as breathing in and then breathing out. The process is even more important than the result.
The acts of deconstructing and reconstructing are essential to my work.
By cutting into pieces photographs that I take (printed on photocopy paper) or other types of paper, I immerse myself into remembering a moment in time, what it is to be human, something that existed but is no longer here.
By gluing the pieces back together, I create a new image of reality that is abstract, obviously imperfect and carries a new meaning, a different perspective on something that feels familiar but somehow out of place and that is soaked in nostalgia and longing most of the time.

I want to make visible to others the beauty I see in the ordinary by photographing the little details that enter my eye and then enlarge, scale down or repeat them in a collage of imagery and thought, so that my experience can be understood and remembered.
In my work, the search for home, roots and cultural identity is also a recurrent theme, as I am an Italian, born and raised in Asia, who has also lived in Italy and The Netherlands and returned to Singapore in her adulthood.