I have always loved drawing, since I was a child. My family has a long tradition of dental technicians. I've learned the first modeling basics in my childhood by observing my father at work, experimenting with materials such as wax, resin, gypsum and ceramic. I have experience with goldsmithing techniques, developing a great interest in miniature and decoration. I studied Art, from high school to the Academy of Fine Arts until my professional training as an Anthroposophical Art Therapist. Many of my sculptures are born from a painting or a drawing, sculpture is for me a natural completion of my graphic and pictorial works. All my works are inspired by an animistic inner vision of reality connected with literature, poetry, music, dreams, nature, daily life, focusing in the relationship between plants and humans.  My Grandfather and my Father, 1954 Chiba by Andrew Loughnane, Berlin 2009 [Artist, curator / Chicago] Combining graphic elements, a touch of cuteness, and a healthy dose of cynicism, the works of Chiba offer the viewer insight into the mind of the contemporary urban girl. Fun-loving, cartoonesque works are counterposed with pixilated logo-drawings and sculptural elements that will make your heart melt and throw your brain into high gear. The impossible. Or it so impossible...? by Caroline Alix Sarraf, New York 2007 [Artist, photographer / New York] Stepping into the extraordinary world of contemporary Italian artist cHiba we are instantly captivated and amused by her witty and intelligent mutations and transformations of the banal. She has invited us to into her imagination, a private tour to a place populated by bizarre beings where we explore the remote beauty found in the monstrous and grotesque. Dissecting and reassembling children's rubber and plastic toys she breathes life into models from a magical environment inhabited by unlikely characters a kind to those we found once in Alice's Wonderland. Shifting scale from miniature models to life size and sometimes enormous we are asked to accept these characters trapped in our world. In our youth we learned to appreciate beauty as being proportionately pleasing or "anatomically correct" and reject the unbalanced or shocking without allowing the question, "What is beauty?" By asking us to reconsider these standard values cHiba brings forth a wonderful world of possibilities and in effect, the innocence in us all. Her figures seem familiar to us, but are we to them? Who is invading into whose world and perhaps are we humans the more eccentric race? They also seem somehow smarter, more aware of how to co-exist re-using each other's cast away parts. Our human desire to be always more perfectly formed and "just like everyone else" seems somehow more bizarre and ironic than in their world. Raising the issue of modern man's fascination with genetic engineering and perfection she is reflecting on a science where man is created and enhanced in a laboratory, chosen part by part. cHiba's possible alternative to the real world invites poetic reflection on the existence and risks of our technological civilization. Love and revenge.....on a world that believes that to be good you must be beautiful..... Take them home and look after them.... Her work is fused with ambiguity. Often combining whimsical passages of poetry, names derived from literature, listing the components within, describing their features, functions or possible non-functions of her creations. But these play on words tend to lead the viewer nowhere, in circles even more disoriented, or in fact as off-course as her characters are themselves. |