Paola Raggo

Brisbane, Queensland

Visual artist Paola Raggo is originally from Santiago, Chile. Her first interest in street maps started with her need for orientation in her several trips back and forth between Australia and Chile. Then a need for belonging developed, so they become a metaphor and the centre subject in her work.

Paola's work is an intuitive and exploratory engagement with the street: street maps that reveal geometric nets forming organic and geometric shapes. Paola sees the space in between like a fantastic abstract design made for a purpose other than beauty, yet it is profoundly aesthetic.

Through her process of extracting shapes from maps and translating them into silver sheet, Paola can suggest places, people, lifestyles, cultures, and feelings. The map starts to become a metaphor - speaking about place and the survival of natural forms.