Christine Palamidessi

Christine Palamidessi explores the imprint of time, history, and mind on the interaction of materials, as experienced in myth and the body. “I develop visuals based on fragmentation,” she says. “Then I reassemble, pushing the conversation to the viewer’s current experience, unfolding sensations of completeness within the incomplete.”

Palamidessi studied with Italian cartapesta and mask makers in Lecce and Venice, becoming adept at the techniques she uses for her current work.

She has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is in collections in France, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Taiwan, Italy, and the United States. She has received the Barbara Demming Women’s Award and the Urban Arts Award. Her public art memoir “Grandmothers” is etched on a granite monolith in Boston’s Jackson Square Station.

She works in her Somerville, MA, studio and in Salento, Italy. Her installations and sculptures have been seen in galleries in Boston—particularly Atlantic Works Gallery, Galatea Fine Arts, Boston Sculptor’s Gallery and the State House—as well as in Chicago’s Woman Made Gallery, the Palazzo Bacile di Castiglione, in Spongano, Italy, the Palmieri Foundation Gallery in Lecce, Italy, and the Alfred Gallery in Tel Aviv. She is a former Professor of Writing at Boston University, a published novelist, fiction editor of the academic journal Italian Americana, and she occasionally teaches Writing for Artists Workshops.

Read the NAWA interview with Christine here.