Sonja Porcaro
Artist Statement // My mother’s maiden name ‘Arcobelli’ translates as ‘beautiful arch’. She arrived in Adelaide with her family aged 6 from Southern Italy. My father (and his family) arrived aged 1- also from the South of Italy- in the post-war recruit for migrant labour. Whilst lodging with his two siblings and parents in a single room of a house, my father witnessed a sign on a rental property door in the same street: ‘No Italians, No Children, No Dogs’. I heard this for the first time two years ago when my (paternal) Nonna died. Arches, doorways.
With a nod to the histories of minimalism and abstraction- like much of my work- ‘humble’ materials are utilised, that also pay homage to the skills/knowledges/practises my parents brought with them here and passed on- sewing, woodwork, gardening, gleaning, language- and recall my preoccupation too, with ‘drawing’ with cotton thread on the floor as a child. Arches, doorways and the (often loosely) stitched threads of memory and remembering.
Sonja Porcaro is a mid-career artist based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, South Australia, working predominantly in sculpture, installation and sound. Porcaro uses everyday objects to create restrained and poetic works, investigating notions of memory (drawing on her Italian migrant heritage), uncertainty and the fluidity of language, representation and meaning.
Since graduating from the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia (First Class Honours) in 1993, Porcaro has exhibited locally, nationally and internationally. Porcaro has also exhibited in many independent and artist run spaces in both South Australia and New South Wales. Porcaro has undertaken many residencies throughout her career, including Studio Kura, Itoshima, Japan, the Australia Council Residential Studio, Milan, Italy and the Athens School of Art Studio (Delphi Annex) Greece. Porcaro’s work has been collected by the Art Gallery of South Australia, the College of Fine Art, NSW and is in private collections in Australia.
Various threads inform this work. Like much of my work, I have responded to site/architecture- the curved ceiling of the railway concourse, the arched windows and many other arches found in the building, the site as a place of arrivals, departures, passages, passengers: hope, trepidation, migration, a threshold between the familiar and the unknown- a leap.
Marie Falcinella writes about Sonja Porcaro in Neoterica 2024.
Sonja Porcaro, Il Passaggio/Passage (detail), 2023-2024, untreated pine, stainlesssteel mesh, found (wood/plastic) vintage cotton spools,dimensions variable. Sam Roberts Photography.
