Giuseppina Santoro

Giuseppina's work focuses on Immigrant Folk Art and connections to home and belonging in Contemporary Art. Researching traditional, cultural, ritualistic and religious objects made around the home and how this attaches to our identity and belonging.

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Background

Pina Santoro is an artist who's practice is mainly sculpture based, but still maintains her strong links with painting, print, textiles, sound, ceramics and socially engaged performance.
Her concerns lie in culture, identity, displacement and feminism. She brings to light the frustrations and lived experiences of placement and displacement as a second generation immigrant female born in the UK.
In recent work she created a character to perform at festivals in the UK and Sicily questioning stereotypes and gender equality in community settings.
In 2011, Pina was awarded honours from the Louvre, Paris for her 'Petit Dammes' collages.
She is founder of ICAP project, receiving Arts Council Awards in 2014,'15 and '16.
Teaching includes 3D lecturer in Peterborough schools and colleges, Vivacity Peterborough and Associate Technician at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She currently teaches on outreach programmes  for Kettles Yard, University of Cambridge.

Research interests

"The idea of making things connected to the ‘home’ is subject to individual interpretations and experience. A ‘home’ may be conceived of as our domestic and or physical space, such as a building/house, a geographical space such as a street, a town or a community, or a place and locality where meaningful social relationships and memories take place (Perry and Perry, 2013). Consider then, what would happen to our understandings of our 'home' if seen from the perspectives of women who are immigrants, estranged from their immediate families and friends, due to their immigration gaps such as: race, culture, identity and feelings of displacement.

"Researching everyday life and folk art objects made around the Immigrant home is the beginning of my looking at how cultural behaviours in Italian homes are attached to traditional making connected to our identity and belonging. By researching women from Italy’s diaspora, I will also be touching on gender politics within the Italian/Sicilian home and how its impact informs my artwork. My first hand experience here, drives my research interest in objects that fall into the category of cooking, crafts, sometimes frivolous, decorative items that would be described as traditional Italian folk art including textiles, cooking displays, apparatus and larger items used for festivals and processions."