Elena Berriolo, an Italian artist living and working in New York, is distinguished by her interdisciplinary approach that through the use of the sewing machine, a central tool in her artistic practice, explores the concept of time, understood as a continuous, fluid dialogue between past present and future. A dialogue that Berriolo investigates through the very act of weaving, sewing and repairing, giving life to artist's books and performances. If his early works-installations, sculptures, paintings, tapestries-were large-scale works, since 2011 he has made a radical choice: that of devoting himself almost exclusively to a more intimate dimension, that of the book. Each book is a unique work that often originates precisely from performances, from actions that are denunciations of situations of social injustice, degradation of the environment, to more political ones such as We can mend for peace, a call for peace that the artist has been perpetrating since March 6, 2022, initially conceived as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then also for other international crises.
The use of the sewing machine has a very profound conceptual implication, “...capable of producing-as Berriolo points out-a true three-dimensional line very similar to the one made by Fontana with his knife without injuring the surface as he did with the knife, but above all, while the deep gesture of the knife is an act of violence on the skin of the work, the sewing machine produces a peaceful line.” A line that in a book can be moved, grow in space and time, unbroken, as deep as the medium itself without undermining its stability, that spans its two sides, goes from back to front, from front to back equally, dividing it without breaking it.
Sewn Word focuses on the artistic journey undertaken by Elena Berriolo just from 2011 to the present. On display is a selection of her books, displayed on music stands as if they were musical scores, which the public can leaf through. Each page of each book, leads to the next, through the thread. On each one the artist intervenes with words, texts, acts with color, watercolors, leaves, thorns, dipped in ink. For Crumb Gallery he also created ad hoc, stepping out, after a long time, of the exclusivity of the 'book' format, a wall installation consisting of three distinct series of five elements each: Spoken Words, Unspoken Words, and Written Words. These works explore verbal communication, how words, transcending the limits of the page, expand into a larger and more complex dimension: 'Words are bigger than pages' as the title of Barbara Montefalcone's essay in the exhibition catalog (NoLines editions, which also includes an interview with the artist by Rory Cappelli) reads, a metaphor for the way the artist sees language as a force that transcends physical and material limits.