YOU ARE HERE is an exhibition of collage, painting and printmaking by local artists Daniela Maria Gargiulo and Anna Vartiainen. They first met ten years ago in the children’s playground in Worthing’s Homefield Park, and their work shares a preoccupation with interrogating the local landscape. In this show, their first together, each offers a distinct and different perspective on a shared sense of place.
Daniela Maria Gargiulo is a British artist, born and bred in the Black Country, now living and working in Lancing, West Sussex.
Her highly detailed artwork explores the vernacular: she is interested in ordinary places and seeks out overlooked spaces in quiet hours, rising before dawn to walk her local streets at sunrise, trespassing though silent industrial estates on Sundays, observing urban developments along railway lines through a train window.
In You Are Here she presents a new series of intricately cut collages made from painted paper, inspired by her travels though the local landscape. Daniela invites you to look more closely at your environment and enter hers via her colourful evocations of daily morning walks past Lancing’s park homes, bike rides along the coastal path to Worthing and Shoreham, and escapes by train to Brighton and London.
Anna Vartiainen is a Finnish-born artist living in Worthing, with a deep love of nature and drawing.
Along with everyone else, Anna saw her world shrink to a small geographical area since the pandemic. With her daily life, thoughts and feelings all happening within this constrained space, her house, the local park and streets became her backdrop to everything.
And so this immediate environment came to the fore as artistic subject matter: through appreciating pockets of beauty in the local park, finding herself lost in thought walking the dog at dusk, watching the morning and evening light behind the houses and trees. Even the plants in her garden were studied to create prints and developed into tea towel and card designs.
To the You Are Here exhibition she brings paintings, drawings and original prints set in places that have punctuated the last few years for her.
Instagram: @danielagallery @annasdrawingroom
