Sonja Porcaro is a mid-career Australian artist (based in Adelaide/Tartanya) working predominantly in sculpture, installation and more recently sound. Porcaro uses everyday objects and humble materials to create restrained and poetic works, often investigating notions of memory (drawing on her Italian migrant heritage), uncertainty and the fluidity of language, representation and meaning. In combining intimate, hand crafted objects and materials with more robust structures and often employing repetition, Porcaro also acknowledges and reworks minimalist traditions (with particular consideration to gender), the formal aspects of her work combined with the personal, gestural and sensorial. In undertaking various residencies, Porcaro’s work has also investigated the mutable relationships between given ‘sites’ and their cultural, social and historical associations.
During her residency in Itoshima, Porcaro will explore the rhythms and patterns of everyday life, ideas of language and translation, ideas of permanence/the robust/solid and transience/flux/fragility and in responding to local Japanese architecture (both traditional and contemporary)- homes, shops, offices, markets, and Buddhist/Shinto temples and shrines- ideas of ‘thresholds’: between inside/outside, public/private, visible/invisible and the reverent/ordinary.
Previous international residences undertaken by Porcaro include the Australia Council Residential Studio, Milan, Italy and the Athens School of Art studio (Delphi Annex) Greece. Porcaro’s work has been collected by the Art Gallery of South Australia, the College of Fine Art, New South Wales and is in private collections in Australia.