Contemporary Gozo Goddesses
A version of this article was first published in the online edition of Sunday Circle Magazine on 5th July 2020
Neolithic Gozo seems to have been all about the power of women. The legend of how the Ggantija temples were built features a mighty giantess. But not only that – as we can see in the local archaeological museums, the whole religious cult in those prehistoric times was probably built around goddesses and their strengths.
The temples bear many marks of female energy and power. The sculptures of the curvaceous female statutes that were found in them are a good indication of what was important then.
It intrigued me to find out if this female energy is still tangible today, and, if it does in any way influence female artists living and working on the island. So I decided to talk to a group of twelve women artists who are all connected to Gozo. I put a series of questions to them to deduce what connects their artistic practice with the island.
Interestingly, it is only the non-natives that tend to pick up on a special female energy. Yet, all of the women I interviewed agreed that Gozo is exceptional from an artist’s point of view. Many mentioned the light, the amazing colours, both of the sea as well as of the local stone, others noted the tranquillity and the still largely untouched natural environment that can be found, if one is willing to look for it. The consensus was that Gozo has a vibrant art scene and that there are a significant number of venues to exhibit in. Besides, as the nationality mix in the surveyed group shows, the artistic community here has international flair.
Having said that, I would like to start with the ‘natives’, and let you know what the Gozitans had to tell me. Choosing art as your career is difficult anywhere in the world. But I’d say even more so in a small island community like Gozo.
Maria Cassar, owner of Art E Gallery in Victoria, started getting serious about art quite late in life. With the encouragement of her family she opened her gallery in Victoria in 2005. She found that over the years locals have been taking a greater interest in her exhibitions. Maria is also an artist in her own right and a particular favourite of mine is her series of beach scenes that perfectly capture Gozo’s sparkling summer sunlight in bold brushstrokes and shimmering colours. Even her abstracts bear the marks of her connection to her Mediterranean surroundings, I see “winter on Gozo” in these compositions of warm earthy tones in coarse and grainy textures.
In the ‘native’ category I’d also include Canadian born Gozitan artist Xaxa Calleja, who returned to the island with her Gozitan parents as a child. She now lives in Malta, but maintains a strong bond with her family and friends in Gozo. She draws on the island’s tranquillity and nature, especially the unspoilt rugged shorelines, in her artworks. Xaxa’s works exude a woman’s strength when they are figurative, but have a delicate, ephemeral quality when they tend towards the abstract. She says they definitely give a woman’s perspective and are often a “visual diary” of her life. Her landscapes, inspired by Gozo, conjure up moody coastal views despite their abstraction.
The one ‘true Gozitan’ who got away is Maxine Attard. Maxine is an established artist in the Maltese contemporary art scene whose dream is to pursue art as a full time career. And that is what made her choose to leave Gozo and achieve her aim elsewhere. She is a minimalist and it takes a contemporary art lover to appreciate her panels of delicate beadwork in grids, or repetitive geometric forms, meticulously painted in industrial paints on wood. Maxine refuses to compromise her artistic output for commercial success, and is not afraid to express environmental activism through her art. She laments the fact that art grants in Malta can only be obtained through a laborious and cumbersome bureaucratic process but praises the support she gets from private local galleries.
The second category of Gozitan female artists that emerged from my survey are women who moved here, not because of their relationship with the island, but because of their relationship with an islander.
Tanja Van Poucke, who hails from Belgium, has been living in Gozo since 2003. She combines her love for art with her day job, by running a home gallery within her B&B in Qala. She told me that the colour palette she uses in her paintings has changed from earthy hues to Gozo’s Mediterranean blues and greens. She produces her wonderfully vibrant, yet serene, abstracts above all to satisfy her personal artistic expression and finds buyers for them primarily in the guests of her B&B. Tanja remarked that local art collectors tend to prefer paintings depicting recognisable things like boats and familiar sights like churches, rather than her abstract paintings which she likes to infuse with symbols to express the message she wishes to convey.
This reluctance of the local population to embrace contemporary art has also been mentioned by Austrian artist Hermine Sammut, who moved to the island 18 years ago. Her art is heavily influenced by the quiet pace of life in Gozo, its colours and especially the ever changing light effects in the local landscape, and indeed, its neolithic past. Hermine says that the island transmits a certain energy, although she “cannot place or name it”. The temple goddesses feature often in her work and although these goddesses are indeed quintessentially Gozitan, Hermine finds that it is mostly foreigners who take an interest in and buy her work. She produces delightful ceramic sculptures and has experimented with local clay and natural pigments derived from local plants and soil in her paintings. She offers hands-on experiences with these materials in courses that she runs from her studio in Nadur.
Another artist who offers courses is Jackie Roberts, a British national who settled on the island with an ‘out-of-town’ islander back in 2001. She had made a drastic change to her professional life a few years earlier to embrace the arts full time. Jackie trained as an artistic metalworker in Scotland, a career she embarked on once settled in Gozo, working from a workshop in an old farmhouse. She found a lot of encouragement locally, also within the artistic community. Inspired by the marine life around the island, Jackie initially produced wonderful shoals of metal fish that she sold in dive centres and bars near the sea. Over the years she has moved away from this but her inspiration often springs from the natural environment of Gozo, its architecture, geology and temple culture. Jackie tells me that her work crosses the boundaries between art and craft, yet, is very contemporary and often abstract. Many of her pieces include found objects and up-cycling is part of her artistic process.
Found materials, like driftwood, natural fibres, parts of plants etc. also feature strongly in the work of Sarah Maturin-Baird, another British citizen living and working on the island. She decided to make Gozo her home in 2013, intuitively and spontaneously, having visited the island only once before. She was immediately inspired by the local architecture, be it ancient, old or contemporary. In her gallery, Studio 38, in the centre of Victoria, one can find Gozo-inspired works, ranging from lovely animal paintings on locally collected driftwood to amazing spirit dolls assembled mostly from found and natural objects. Sarah told me that “the fabric of Gozo is in my work”. She is one of the artists who definitely feels a female energy on the island and maintains she draws inspiration from the temple culture and architecture. Having encountered difficulty in finding artists’ materials locally, she often resorts to recycling what is available and found that it has positively influenced her creativity. She leads workshops in her gallery where she shares her creative practices, be it by teaching intuitive painting or amulet making.
Not far from Sarah’s space in Victoria is the quirky ‘Bejta Artisan at The Ta’ Nikol Gallery’. There are three British artists I associate with Bejta Artisan and so I have put them in a category of their own. Their reasons for settling here were similar, they all had young families when they arrived and Gozo provided a safe and relaxed environment to raise their children.
Abi Macleod is a full-time artist, born to create. Indeed, she says she never wanted to do anything else but “draw and paint and make a mess.” I also consider Abi the ‘Queen of Recycling’; her artworks, especially her amazing mosaics, are made with offcuts from tiles, old crockery, buttons and beads. She says that people love the fact that she uses exclusively recycled materials, the only material she buys are adhesives. She saves all unwanted items and finds a use for most things. And because of that her artworks are fabulously unique and full of character. Abi told me she does feel Gozo’s feminine energy and that it sometimes translates into her work.
Her business partner at Bejta Artisan is Emma Morgan, who has worked in the art world all her life and prefers to call herself an arts practitioner. Emma works in different media and styles but her artistic output is always inspired by Gozo. Finding it difficult to source materials, she often uses recycled materials and occasionally resorts to using builder’s products.
When Abi and Emma are out, working on one of their community projects, you might find another Emma holding the fort in the gallery. Emma Borg has been living in Gozo for nearly 19 years and tells me that it is here that her artistic career took off. She held her first exhibition titled ‘Dawn’ in 2008 and assures me that it was indeed the beginning of an important part of her life. Emma gets inspired by the Gozo countryside, and masterfully transfers the tones and textures she encounters in nature onto her canvases. Her flower paintings are vibrant and reflect Gozo’s moods, and indeed are very much in demand with the local population.
Another painter who takes full advantage of the inspirational views of the Gozo countryside is Norma Cili, an American who made Gozo her base two years ago. She told me that one of the deciding factors was the local climate. Norma describes herself as an impressionist plein-air painter and finds that Gozo is ideal for her genre: the varied landscape, the village scenery and the dramatic weather patterns make for wonderful subjects. Norma’s panels are bursting with the local colours, vibrant hues that do not get dulled down - black does not feature in Norma’s palette. She is an active member of the local artistic community and has already exhibited on the island. She finds that the locals appreciate her work, and when she sells her paintings to them it is because ‘..they elicit memories of childhood, life events and the everyday for them’.
I will finish off with another American painter, SJ Fuerst, who is quite unique in this group since she has actually chosen Gozo as the place to work from as a full-time artist. Wanting to leave London, where she and her partner, also a painter, were based, Gozo ticked all the boxes on their wish list: natural beauty, peace and quiet, great light and lots of studio space. SJ told me that she decided to become a painter at age 14. She says “Up until then I'd wanted to be a vet as I love animals, but at 14 I took my first real biology class and realized I would much rather paint animals than dissect them”. She has now been working for a decade and is well established on the international art scene, but has also exhibited locally, both in Malta and at ARThALL gallery in Gozo. Her work, which has been favourably received locally, revolves mostly around women in costumes with inflatable toys, and is an amazing amalgamation of classical painting and pop art, executed in a fantastically realistic style.
Evidently, there has been a lot of praise heaped on Gozo and its qualities, all characteristics that make an artist happy. It is not all ‘sunlight and beach scenes’ though. Many of the artists I interviewed bemoaned the fact that art supplies are often difficult to come by, and remarked on the rather widespread lack of interest in contemporary art in the local community. It was also mentioned that exhibitions tend to be staged with little curatorial input, which can be detrimental to the standard of what goes on show. The public exhibition venues seem to lack adequate promotional support and there are no Gozo based agents who could provide the missing link to the international art market.
Last but not least, development is threatening a lot of the natural beauty here. If the peace and quiet of the countryside gets replaced by the noise and chaos of sprawling urban spaces, there might be very little left that would attract and inspire artists. Gozo will risk ending up – as Tanja suggests in her latest painting series - “buried under numbers” (profits, people, developments). As a result, we might have to consign these contemporary Gozo goddesses and their art to history. Will it then again be left to museums to tell their stories?
All artists can be found and contacted on Facebook or through their websites. Just click on the following links to get in contact with them or to just view more of their art: Maria Xaxa Maxine Tanja Hermine Jackie Sarah
Abi and Emma Emma Norma and SJ
Please click through the gallery to view the pictures
