Elizabeth Aro, always sensitive to themes related to nature, memory, the female condition, and the concept of the “other,” seen from the perspective of someone who, in the first person, belongs to two different cultures and has experienced physical and cultural migration, is a precious opportunity to delve deeply into the imaginative and profoundly emotional world of the artist. It starts with her ability to engage with different techniques: drawing, photography, but above all sculpture, created using precious fabrics that she sews, molds, and embroiders herself, often expanding them to decidedly installative dimensions in dialogue with the architecture that hosts them, private galleries, and public spaces.
Her sculptures give life, with delicacy and at the same time incisiveness, to a true landscape of the soul that draws inspiration from literary sources, dreams, and reflections on the continuous changes that human beings are called to face. In her art, they find the lyrical key of metaphor and allusiveness, filtered through the poetry and lightness of a refined and complex practice.
A lightness that goes from material to thematic: delicate and oversized flowers, flames like many small souls, impalpable wings, sinuous trees and dense branches of leaves, but also unexpectedly soft fabric turned barbed wires, reversing their repulsive meaning – taken for granted – as thorns finally rendered harmless.
Therefore, the transition from fabric weaving to forging in precious metal of this personal vocabulary is consistent and particularly moving: jewelry, like weaving, carries an ancient non-verbal language, loaded with expressive and ritual force, of which it has always been a bearer. Adorning oneself is one of the earliest expressive codes of humankind, and Elizabeth considers it as such, reinterpreting it with contemporary visions closest to her, which have shaped her personal cultural heritage.
From being an installation, the artwork becomes wearable in a natural transfer, at times unstoppable and touching, like a dreamlike projection that turns from sculpture into a talisman, protection, poetic declaration, self-affirmation. The daily choice to wear a flame or many small flames becomes a sign of life and passion, a wing like a desire, a rose, a barbed wire – made innocent and precious – as a declaration of strength and female empowerment, but not only that: signs of a silent and gentle revolution, courageous and full of grace and wonder.