Solo uno is Claudia Mazzotta’s first exhibition at Side Gallery. Her work hangs across both galleries of the Red Hill site, and her hand-embroidered vintage linen, collection of polaroids, and frenetic mixed-media studies all focus on the same thing: her motif—a painted, stitched, and photographed flower.

Words by Jessica McNicol

Mazzotta leads the discussion about this body of work as we move from piece to piece, and she tells me where her fixation on the image of the carnation began. 

"My Italian mother grew carnations in the front yard and would send me outside to bring back a flower. As I was running out the front door, she would always yell, ‘Solo Uno!’. She would place the single flower in a small vase to honour loved ones who had died.” 

It's a rich memory, vivid and personal, steeped in the culture of her Italian heritage. Of course, it's also where the title of the collection comes from. “Solo Uno”— called out from the kitchen — Solo Uno—just one. 

This action of memorial revisited much later in life, has appreciated in its service- Mazzotta’s singular childhood carnations are themselves memories now, and as I think about the way that has influenced her work, the conclusion becomes that Mazzotta’s real study here is on the passing of time. By deliberately returning to interrogate her memory, Mazzotta’s family and their connections become defined by a kind of proto-bloom — one that could be any — and we are connected to them through the purposeful construction and deconstruction of this timeless flower. 

The subtle language of time is more obviously embodied by Mazzotta’s choice to include studies and polaroids in this collection. In an echo of the driving concepts behind Solo Uno, these flowers are sometimes blurry, hazy, ghostly, or otherwise indistinct, some even captured in situ in a variety of suburban garden beds. As representations of her practice, these are helpful reminders that art-making is itself a process unfurling through time and that it is the artist’s nature to be reflective - to examine, to take stock, to be gentle here and deliberate there; to represent or to allude - and Mazzotta purposefully presents these actions in the real, the studied, and the alluded to. 

Mazzotta’s works in the main gallery are all larger in scale, and in terms of process, each begins with a piece of vintage linen - the textiles and threads she uses are all found or donated and as such, bear the warmth and wear of their own lives. Sometimes this is overt, as with Mums Carnations, which bears the faint outlines of an embroidery plan never actioned; or in To Catch a Memory, where the unmistakable lace applique of a women’s handkerchief lends its delicate border to a vibrant yellow flower in the early stages of blooming. The unknown heritage of these textiles is important to Mazzotta, and she acknowledges the sustainability of repurposing, but also the accumulative lived experience that each of these disparate pieces represents. In this choice, Mazzotta's canvas becomes the fabric of time. 

Mazzotta works purposefully into the surface of these delicate textiles with expressive layers of paint, pencil, and Conte, creating coloured layers that range from the suggestion of light-touching petals to the thick inky depth of a rose. 

Her process then turns to hand stitching that enhances and, in some cases, completely obliterates the delicate blooms beneath. In a mirror of the process used for the painted layers, Mazzotta is loose and instinctive with her thread and likens her approach to a tactile method of drawing more than methodical stitching. The result fractures the traditional static nature of the still-life flower and instead constructs a freeing movement that encapsulates the ephemeral nature of distant memory — fragmented and indistinct. 

For Mazzotta — now a mother herself — the process of hand stitching takes place at the kitchen table during moments snatched from busy days, and in this environment, too, she is forging a connection to the memory behind Solo Uno. Each stitched line meanders across the fabric without a set course, and it's the length of the aged thread that will determine the destiny of these marks. Knots and catches in the delicate cotton are preserved, and as Mazzotta stitches in small sections at different times, the whole of the image is only revealed once complete- imperfections and all. 

Mazzotta’s contemplative practice fastens fragments of memory into the physicality of her media. Solo Uno is not just an interrogation of personal memory — single carnations performing their memoriam, a playful ritual between mother and daughter — but a series of actions that seek to make physical time itself.