Women
A tribute to women, to the eternal feminine and to the current state of the woman’s role in society.
Inspired by the words of Clarissa Pinkola Estès in her book “Women who run with the wolves”: “She is the Life/Death/Life force, she is the incubator. She is intuition, she is far-seer, she is deep listener, she is loyal heart. She encourages humans to remain multilingual; fluent in the languages of dreams, passion, and poetry. She whispers from night dreams, she leaves behind on the terrain of a woman’s soul a coarse hair and muddy footprint”.
Women is the result of a very personal work on women in general: there is a desire to escape the cage, out of two-dimensional situations and into three-dimensionality.
Hair, like branches, comes out of the earthly space and tries to invade the rest.
It is a renaissance of drama. A drama which is felt, lived at its full, where the woman fearlessly exposes herself in all her sensuality.
She is proud and conscious of everything that was and is. She is ready to come out of the box from which she was born, like a Venus from the shell.
In the paintings, the female theme continues to be predominant, forms slowly evolving out of wood, where knots remain strengths and not weaknesses.
Emerging from matter or blurred in the background, perspicuous or ragged, these bodies expand in tangles looking for territories to conquer.
Intertwined branches of tree-women point towards the sky. They shun two-dimensionality while remaining with their roots tied to the earth from which the lifeblood flows.
From the canvases, bodies and faces of women evolve in a continuous metamorphosis, as a result of artistic growth and inner maturation.
The female body, in close connection with the world, opens us up to it, overcoming the old dichotomy between subject and object, figure and background.
Wood, bronze, clay and copper are humbly moulded and adapted to celebrate the eternal female figure.
Copper, an intensifier of energy exchange, has always been associated with the planet Venus, symbol of femininity.
‘Women’ is intended as a tribute to women, to the daily struggles they face, to the ravages of the world and of a society that fails to accept their desire and ability to be autonomous and free from all constraints.
Federica Toppan
In 1994 she entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. In her fourth year she won a scholarship at The Université des Arts Plastiques in Paris. After obtaining the Academic Diploma in Painting she began to collaborate as a designer for well-known companies in Bologna and Rimini. She currently teaches at the Liceo Artistico Edgardo Mannucci in Ancona.