This autumn, CAMPLE LINE is delighted to present Keepsake, an exhibition of new work by Argentinian artist Amalia Pica, in which she continues her exploration of longstanding interests: early years education, history and memory-making, material culture, shared action, collective enjoyment and forms of common knowledge. The exhibition will open on 4 October and run until 14 December.

Pica was born in Argentina and has lived and worked in London since 2008, exhibiting widely internationally over the last twenty years. Her practice is diverse, encompassing sculpture, drawing, performance, video and installation, and often taking the form of temporary interventions or sculptural assemblages that draw viewers into collaboration or conversation. Pica has said about her work: ‘I think about what links my work together more as a constellation than a progression. I’m constantly pulling from an array of strings.’

Pica’s wider practice has often focused on communication and the many ways we try to make ourselves understood to one another and share meaning often across different cultural contexts. Using simple materials and found objects, her work frequently investigates moments of shared sentiment or common cause – working, playing, remembering, learning, protesting, resisting, commemorating or celebrating together – and the political potential of joy. Banners, placards and bunting regularly feature in her work, as do souvenirs, paperweights, trinkets and objects that become vessels for personal meaning. She has also described her practice as, in part, ‘a quest for what other people know too.’

Keepsake brings together a group of embroideries on linen with a new sculptural work in bronze, a collaboratively-made installation of pressed daisy chains, and One hundred and thirty-four years of smoke, a work that Pica is developing with filmmaker Rafael Ortega that comprises a still life painting of 1891 that Ortega found at a car boot sale in east London and a two channel video work. 

Seemingly disparate, these works each have a basis in some aspect of Pica’s life – ‘me being Argentinian, me being a mum, me having been an art teacher’ – though not in any specific or anecdotal way: ‘I am someone who works from the world. I don’t make worlds myself. I’m constantly looking around and finding or drawing on things.’