Gigi Giovanelli (USA) was in residence for one month in June 2025 on the Open Residency for International Artists.
About the Artist
Gigi Giovanelli is a sculptor based in New York City. She studied Fine Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and is currently pursuing a BFA in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design. Her practice centers on sculpture as a form of storytelling, grounded in material sensitivity and emotional resonance.
Rooted in her upbringing in North Carolina, Gigi’s work reflects a lifelong physical and emotional closeness to nature. Her sculptures often take the form of delicate, creature-like beings, suspended in states of balance and transformation. These forms speak to the fragile systems, both ecological and emotional, that hold us in place. Through them, she raises questions about support, purpose, and what it means to live within, or beyond, the boundaries of the present.
By blurring the distinctions between humans, animals, and natural forms, Gigi creates sculptural landscapes that evoke a sense of loss and the inevitability of return.
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About the Residency
During my one-month residency in Malaysia, I chose to work entirely with materials gathered from the surrounding landscapes: burnt soil, coconut husks, and fallen branches. From these fragments of the environment, I created a series of sculptural creatures that stand and balance on their branch limbs, as though drawing support and life from the very materials they are made of.
This body of work emerged from a sensitivity to place and questions of home, investigating the origins of one’s own body and the land it calls home. The coconut shells and burnt soil: remnants of both growth and destruction, became metaphors for the ongoing cycles of life, death, and regeneration.
The creatures’ delicate balancing acts speak to the fragile interdependence we share with our environments, both physical and emotional. Just as the sculptures rely on their landscape for support, we too depend on external systems – ecological, communal, and psychological – to stay upright. This work becomes a visceral outline of those supports, a reflection on the invisible forces that keep us held. The sculptures reflect how all life depends on a delicate and sometimes unstable balance with nature.
As I worked, I found myself drawn to the idea of being lost in one’s own body, searching for a sense of belonging and grounding in a vessel that never quite feels like home. This internal displacement: of seeking support within the body but never fully arriving, led me back to the land. That’s why I chose to build the creatures from soil, coconut husks, and fallen branches: all materials that had already returned to the earth, and yet, through this process, found a new life within my forms. In this quiet cycle of return and renewal, the sculptures embody a journey where longing meets stillness, and the revelation emerges that perhaps the belonging we seek inside ourselves has always existed in the ground beneath us.
In making this work, I lent the creatures an animistic spirit, imagining the land as alive, intelligent, and expressive – qualities it truly holds, though often overlooked in its stillness. This work is as much about presence as it is about form. Each creature holds the memory of the physical land and the emotional scaffolding we lean on. They remind us that we are shaped by our surroundings, that we come from the earth, and ultimately, we return to it.
