I ALSO GREW UP ON A ROCK

An island is enveloped by its sea. As the waves crash against its cliffs, it hardly changes. As the sun rises and sets each day, its stone shimmers from one coast to the other. An island is a rock under constant external force. With it, you too become aware of the winds that constantly front you. The rock does change. The rock becomes you. 

I also grew up on a rock—the same one Neal Camilleri is from.

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In this graduate body of work Neal Camilleri is adding to a long lineage of work which is derived from stone, the only natural resource which is abundant in Malta. He does this through establishing new tropes; narratives of play which encounter the landscape to generate a new gaze. The rubble walls which segregate fields and the megalithic temples of Malta somehow come together in his work. In both, it is striking to observe simultaneous monumentality and fragility. Large stones in the former seem to challenge physics and human possibility. Small stones in the latter seem too fragile to withstand the elements, and yet come together to create long expanses that stand the test of time. 

In Malta, rock is everywhere. It kisses our fertile red soil, and embraces the gushing blue waves. It sings near the green of our prickly pear and it reflects the bright amber of our sun. Perhaps this is why Camilleri proposes it as a spectrum of fiercely vibrant colours. In it he sees the potential to contest its seemingly rigid stance. He plays with the way rocks are mounted upon each other and he positions himself between the natural and the man-made. 

What is in fact the line between the natural and the man-made? I have for a while now been fascinated by this question. Practically all that is natural has been influenced by the intervention of humankind; what is man-made eventually becomes part of nature. Camilleri’s work sits at this threshold. In rock he sees the potential to manipulate space, to rewrite stories, to establish a new relationship with the natural world and to challenge the way we see it. The rock has become him.

In this body of work Neal Camilleri presents himself with an agency to forge a new nature. He embeds equal parts memory and curiosity in order to create new objects of wonder. He derives from the natural around him, sentiments of the man-made. He understands that the natural environment he grew up in has been forged by the hands of his ancestors and that he himself has the chance to do the same. He sculpts for us a worldview.

What I immediately liked about this group of works is the marriage of Camilleri’s painting with his sculpture. It is as if to juxtapose the act of seeing, with what is being seen. There is a prospective nostalgia about this perspective. In the paintings on ceramic, the rock in the distance commands the viewer’s attention. It is almost as if we are witnessing his understanding of what the rocks are to see what they can be. In his mind’s eye the landscape is at play. The rubble walls are not linear and the prickly pear is not growing. Both invert the very nature they are known for to become something new.

This comes at an important time for our Mediterranean island, when our landscape is at war with globalisation; when the rock we so loved is being enveloped not by Camilleri’s monumental new vernacular but by a blanket of grey, bland, all-consuming rigidness. Camilleri’s prickly pear would be a beacon in an otherwise desaturating scene. Perhaps for this to become our new nature, his man-made interventions need to manifest soon. There is an urgent aspiration within this body of works and it comes with a refreshing new hope for a return to a vibrant future.

I also grew up on a rock—and I can only hope it will one day soon look again the way Neal Camilleri is seeing it.