I wish smoking was good for you. 

“We as a humanity have been through so much, even the flowers are smoking.”

Rhea Micallef Gavin, Maltese and London based, explores the relationship of social identity and the fashion industry through painting and printmaking.

 To use painting as a form of research to explore the notions of masculinity from a feminine point of view. “If our clothing is our direct expression of self, how has the current state of gender influenced fashion brands and identity?” This question initiated the process of exploring the current gender conundrum, by what it means to be a masculine woman and a not so masculine man through making art. 

The pandemic brought the opportunity to question the view from her living room. Rhea used the process of digital collage, print and painting to question how identity is often performative and reflective of the circumstance we are in. This inspired more compositional experimentation. The furniture acts as grounding to the prints to represent quiet, lonely reflection as the painter returns to the world created inside their head. 

In this new series ‘I wish smoking was good for you’ Rhea continues her conversation of identity yet turns to the objects surrounding us, such as clothes, chairs, cups and tables to represent our responses to the current state of society. Stiff leather boots to express change yet to come or an empty wonky chair to relate loneliness.

Rhea takes everything she has learnt from her experience in the fashion industry and pours it into florals inspired by her Maltese heritage.
  This new series is a response to the struggles faced and the struggles coming. “We as a humanity have been through so much, even the flowers are smoking. Life can so often seem elusive and heavy, I wanted to magic a happy reflection of confinement, uncertainty and strangeness.”