Born in Melbourne, Silvia A Famularo has had numerous art works selected as Finalists in Art Awards, including Contemporary Art Awards, Whyalla Art Prize and Who is Looking at You? Portrait Prize. She completed a B.ED - Visual Arts at The University of Melbourne and a Masters by Coursework, Visual Arts at Monash University.
Famularo is a Secondary Art Teacher and a proud and dedicated Mother of three. She has exhibited in and curated numerous group exhibitions over two decades.
Her art work addresses multi-layered themes of identity and lineage and she draws on a miscellany of materials and processes into the play of her art making. Her figurative work and portraiture explores gesture, altered bodies and methods of disguise that border on the surreal, presenting somewhat folkloric aspects of human experience and her own Southern Italian lineage.
Famularo's allegorical and intimate tableaux at times includes the re-creation of artworks produced by her children, bringing a complexity to readings of Motherhood and domestic experience, with themes of cyclical loss, grief and fear appearing alongside whimsical, painterly qualities.
In her solo exhibition, 'Leave The Light On' at Montsalavat's Long Gallery in Eltham (2017), she represented a personal alternate universe, rich with ancestral motifs.
The work, "End of an Era" (2017) formed part of the "Leave the Night Light On" exhibition at Montsalvat. The processes employed include both manual and digital collage, photography, Fine Art printing and mixed media, combined with the use of thread, oil paint, Photoshop, chalk pencils and pinholes.
Her "Impossible Body" (2015) series of paintings reference her suite of collages, which depict the performance-based feats of contorted and awkward postures that one experiences in the daily grind of work and play. Notions of beauty, introspection and reinvention are laid bare which led to the creation of altered portraits of the body.
Underpinning much of Famularo's portfolio is her collage method of weaving together otherwise disparate vintage and art historical imagery to form precise patterns and connections.
Website: https://silviafamularo.wixsite.com/silviaafamularo
Instagram: silvia_famularo