Borgo Museo | Nuove Opere 2019 – 2021
* La Residenza d’Artista 2021 (seconda edizione) è un progetto a cura di CCT-SeeCity per la Pro Loco di Castagno, realizzato con il contributo della Fondazione Caript nell’ambito del bando Per la cultura #iorestoattivo 2021 e patrocinato dal Comune di Pistoia. Clicca qui per vedere foto e video.
Biography
Bianca Lugmayr was born in Wels in 1979. She studied pharmacy at the Leopold Franzens University in Innsbruck and textile art and design at the Linz University of Art. She then completed her studies with a diploma course in Cultural Management at the Institute for Cultural Concepts in Vienna.
Philosophy
In her sewn works, Bianca Lugmayr tells collage stories about femininity, being a woman and the right to a self-determined life. She is interested in blending and dissolving the boundaries of painting, embroidery, printing, photography and working with paper. The fast and loosely sewn line present in her installations is a central element of her current works and represents individuality, liberation from perfectionism, raw beauty and the value of error.
Artwork in Castagno
The Artist’s Residence held in Castagno was the first residence ever that the artist had in Italy. With her work Calma interiore (Inner stillness in English), Bianca Lugmayr tried to give voice to her state of mind when she arrived in Castagno, to that inner and outer buzz then transformed into calm, through a textile installation composed of two transparent linen sheets that move with the passage of the wind, with his fingerprints made through a white vegetable dye. The white textile paint is composed of mineral pigments: “They are placeholders for the traces in the mind and soul, things you carry with you, beautiful, sad, learned”. The artist also embroidered words of silence, inner contemplation, transcendence with gold thread: “Inner stillness is my happiness”, like a mantra that is carried out. The verses sewn with golden silk are in Italian in the first sheet and in German in the second. The delicate, translucent, touching, moving material lets the words flow into nature like prayer flags that move with the wind. Castagno is in fact for Bianca a link to her becoming immobile: “The tranquility of the small place, the raw beauty of nature, the trees, the luxuriant green of the forest make all thoughts disappear”. Thoughts she brought with her from the fast pace of the city, from the frenetic pace, from constantly thinking about the future, from the neglect of everyday life. Castagno has been granted a happiness that with her work everyone can take away with them.
The fabrics will change with time and the influence of nature, but this does not scare the artist, on the contrary: it is deliberately desired and chosen, since this transience shows very well how everything in the world is in constant motion.
The golden phrase sewn onto the linen cloth in German is: Inneres Stillwerden, Inneres Stillwerden ist mein Glück. In Italian instead: Calma interiore, Calma interiore è la mia felicità. Both meaning: Inner calm, Inner calm is my happiness. But in the middle of this sentence you can also read other words: as in a spontaneous flow of thoughts and feelings, the sentence is interrupted by single words like Stille (silence), still sein (to be silent), sei endlich still (finally in silence). And if the artist were to describe Castagno in one word, without hesitation, she would say: Stille (silence).