Siglinda Scarpa

About us:

Siglinda is like trying to sew a button on a butterfly in flight or, when it comes to her fierce defense of animal and human rights (in that order), on a hornet. In the first instance, the subject eludes easy categorization; in the second, one is likely to be stung. Butterfly and hornet at the same time--small wonder that we find a body of work, executed over a not always tranquil lifetime in Italy and the United States, that ranges from the delicacy of a petal to a raw beauty wrenched from somewhere deep inside her.

Siglinda is best understood, as a matter of fact, through her seeming contradictions. When we look at the way she has shaped a clay form, feathering the edges, turning them this way and that, like the tops of seas breaking into foam and bending to the whim of the wind, we imagine her long tapered fingers playing over the clay like fingers on a harp. We can only imagine them, though, because her hands are in fact like the paws of a small animal, a raccoon, maybe, or the soft paws of one of her big Maine Coon cats--the claws withdrawn for now. Her voice is like a silver bell, small and true when she sings--but for herself only, remembering some dream of Tuscany or her grandmother--but she also has, when required, the mouth of a stevedore, capable of words (often in Italian, one is relieved to note) that can shame the arrogant and silence the bully. In short, she is a cross between Giulietta Masina--the innocent Gelsomina of La Strada as well as the optimistic Cabiria, always betrayed but always hopeful--and Anna Magnani, the feisty and defiant Magnani of Mamma Roma ("Will you explain to me why I'm a nobody and you're the king of kings? Whose fault is it that people are born without money?") riding on the back of a motorcycle.

It may or may not be correct to conclude, as one observer does, that the commedia dell'arte--the art form so closely identified with the Italian character--has its roots in the temperament of the Middle Ages, a time when, in the words of Johan Huizinga, "violent contrasts...lent a tone of excitement to everyday life and tended to produce [a] perpetual oscillation between despair and distracted joy," but this latter condition does have everything to do with Siglinda's art. As much passion spent in grief as in joy--and no brooding over the one or reveling in the other--as well as a great capacity for love, but when the object of her love is threatened, an almost equal one for anger that can mount, yes, to hatred--it is this temperament that accounts in large measure for the paradox we sense in her art, some pieces as delicate as a rose or a cloud unfolding, others as threatening as a buzz saw, and still others as blunt as a punch in the nose.