Warning! This local poetry & illustration project will cause some serious soul searching
Poetry and art. Art and poetry. No matter how you put it, it always sounds great. The combination of the two can be tricky, a scary feat that can leave the reader or viewer with troubling questions, or rather answer the very question you find puzzling you most days. Poetry and art have the power to instigate intrigue or respond to the unclarity in life.
Last year, Giulia Privitelli and Stephen Bonello embarked on a journey titled Walking in Circles, a project that came about when the two met, by coincidence. Their fortunate encounter came about due to Giulia’s involvement in voluntary organisation agara, through which she was tasked with a hugely creative responsibility that was intended to raise artistic awareness by means of a campaign that would generate funds for the organisation. Her initial plan was to plaster billboards with messages of social inclusion, but the material they had in mind required an illustrator - this is where Stephen joins the story.
The idea of publishing a collection of poems accompanied by detailed illustrations came about after a voluntary trip Giulia went on with the agara Foundation. Her daily refuge in conveying her thoughts into poetry developed into a lot more than she’d intended: publishing her work on Facebook resulted in a swarm of positive comments leading her to Stephen and his artistic expression. Their material resulted in a book: funded by the Malta Arts Fund and published by Kite Group, with literary expert Giuliana Fenech backing their work.
Structuring such a publication required insight, passion and pure commitment. “Steve is an incredibly keen observer; he listens with his eyes and reads with his ears. He has a way of presenting life as we know it in an inverted and witty way, but there is almost always a sense of that something which is missing, a subtle sense of desolation.”
Every piece starts with a mere observation, that and in time and a considerable amount of thought, the style in which the illustrations came about became a new language and a prominent voice that Steve was free to create. His only instruction: “make it look sketchy”... in an ink or graphite sense - the interpretation is eventually up to every individual viewer.
The crude nature of Giulia’s poetry was amplified by Stephen’s illustrations; eventually churning up 52 poems that create a pique in curiosity, interest and a burning desire to understand how things works, the way things are. “The curious part is that the poems and the illustrations often keep returning to the same things – nature, art, time, age, death and love where the poems are concerned; trees, the sea, cliffs and hooded figures when it comes to the illustrations.”
And now that the work has been published, this open circle leaves the artists with a bundle of questions… one of which inadvertently is; what to do next?