This autumn, we are delighted present murmur, buzz, hiss and rub, a new solo exhibition by artist Chiara Camoni (born 1974, Piacenza, Italy) at CAMPLE LINE, opening 5 October 2024. The exhibition will bring together over 30 works by Chiara, from the monumental to the tiny, and includes three new works made using clays, soils and plant matter from Cample and nearby villages.

Chiara is one of the foremost Italian artists of her generation, and she lives and works in the mountain village of Fabbiano in Northern Tuscany, Italy. She has said of her practice: ‘Everything stems from a personal fact – the choice to live in a village in the Apuan Alps – this has become a political choice to some extent.’ Her studio practice represents a commitment to live and work beyond major urban centres and to root the production of her sculptural work in local economies and community processes. Working with friends and family and members of her village, Camoni uses diverse materials, including raw clay, stone, flowers and plants sourced near her home, as the basis for a wide-ranging body of work that has been exhibited extensively internationally.

Georgia Massari has referred to Camoni’s work as ‘a dance between ancient knowledge and everyday knowledge, in which nature plays a prominent role.’ Her works combine vernacular, archaic and ancestral forms, often collapsing the boundaries between the human and more-than-human. These concerns have coalesced in her Sister series (2017 onwards) in particular – monumental female divinities that assume varying zoomorphic and anthropomorphic forms. Of the Sisters, Chiara has said: ‘they are female figures, but I would say that they encompass a little bit of everything…the masculine, the animal, the vegetable, the mineral…Each has its own bearing, has its own attitude and they ask us for a relationship.’

Chiara has described her exhibitions as gatherings of eyes, of figures, of presences, of animals, of insects – ‘some visible right away, other emerging slowly.’ Often, a sense of vibration and inter-connection attend her works – ‘moving in the snakes slithering low to the ground, rising in the more vertical figures, winding up and down’. 

Murmur, buzz, hiss and rub will invoke this sense of shared energy and living inter-dependence, acknowledging and drawing upon the species richness and bio-diversity found around Cample and as salute not only the history of human presence in our building, but to the spiders, frogs and creatures that attempt to make their home in it, or negotiate it enroute to Cample Water.

Upstairs at CAMPLE LINE, Chiara will install the monumental Sister, 2023, built with threaded handmade ceramic beads and other terracotta and ceramic elements, around which she will gather a group of 17 Gioielli – tiny, small-scale sculptures that reference spiders, small insects and winged creatures and have been made by melting pieces of jewellery – and a set of six Vasi Farfalla, including a new diptych glazed with clays and soils from around Cample and Penpont.

On the ground floor, visitors will encounter Burning Sister, 2024, a new film by Chiara featuring a Sister form that she built outdoors using botanical matter whilst participating in Makryammos Ephemeral Art Residency in Thassos. Close by, Due Serpenti, 2024, will animate the entrance space alongside a number of Grande Sorella, large necklace-like sculptures, and a set of three self-portrait drawings.

Murmur, buzz, hiss and rub is Chiara’s first exhibition in Scotland, and is accompanied by a newly commissioned short essay by independent curator and academic Cecilia Canziani. Over their long friendship, Chiara and Cecilia have worked together on numerous exhibitions, editorial projects, performances, and travelling seminars.

Chiara Camoni is represented by ARCADE, Brussels and London, and by SpazioA in Pistoia, Italy.   

With grateful thanks to Creative Scotland and The Henry Moore Foundation for their funding support.