statement.

Nina Gerada’s sculptures play with scale, pattern and positive and negative space. She merges figurative and architectural motifs, exploring the interconnectedness between buildings, communities and people. Having left her homeland in her teens, Gerada’s work combines memory with elements of language to examine the postcolonial and migrant experience.

Gerada is drawn to repetitive processes, pattern finding and has a tendency to make connections across varied scales. Her process involves carving and tearing clay, exposing fault lines, embedding it with the imprints of tools and often combining it with raw, rusty metals. Working in multiples, she reconfigures the separate elements to create patterns, searching for balance and movement. Reminiscent of maps, empty swimming pools and archaeological digs of ancient cities; her pieces reference bricks, blueprints and typeset printing blocks. More recent works are intentionally cracked in the kiln, symbolic of weathered buildings and ageing skin. They allude to an acceptance of imperfection, unpredictability and change.

References to the rock formations and carved spaces of her homeland, Malta, appear in Gerada’s work. The island’s Neolithic statues, temples and artefacts are an inspiration, through which Gerada explores her experience as a migrant and a mother. The Siluwetta pieces resemble interconnected circular spaces as well as silhouettes of women. Here, courtyards, rooms and tombs are wombs, breasts, and vulvas. Totemic symbols intertwining notions of women as life giving vessels, of mothering and the psychological theories of containment, the impulse to be embedded in the rock, and a yearning for community and connectedness.