Collage d’Or
DAVE MILTON
Rock Paper Scissors, a solo exhibition by Daniela Maria Gargiulo at Hastings Arts Forum, comprises sixty pictures made in the three years since the artist’s daughter left home. That particular loss informs all the works, along with a sense of discovery arising from Daniela’s exploration of the Sussex coast. Subtitled Local Landscapes in Collage, the show ranges from familiar landmarks like Eastbourne’s Martello Tower and the Sound Mirrors at Denge to the neglected nooks and crannies of day-to-day urban sprawl.
Daniela lights upon the windswept rooftop of De La Warr Pavilion (on which sits a pair of abandoned plastic chairs), the windowsill of Bexhill Used Appliance Centre (home to a tangle of unruly weeds) and the tattered advertising hoardings at Warrior Square station.
If the choice of subject suggests a follower of ‘grim art’, Daniela’s dramatic command of colour transforms these scenes into a blissful celebration of the ordinary. Rock Paper Scissors depicts a vernacular landscape with everyday insight and revelation. Abandoned factories rub shoulders with High Romantic castles and modernist concrete ruins with abundant wild flower meadows. Solid stone and exuberant nature struggle under unsettled skies. Each otherworldly image offers the fleeting promise of home.
Gargiulo’s intricately assembled collages are made from painted paper. It’s laborious work involving layer upon layer of meticulous cut-and-paste and elaborate colour palettes – purples and lavenders, synthetic greens and electric yellows. Where the viewer’s eye searches instinctively for painterly gestures – brush strokes or palette knife marks – instead are found tiny strands of paper, applied with rhythmic complexity.
With a background in fashion, her approach is that of an artisan. The results are a far cry from what we typically expect from collage: there are no knowing nods to consumerism, no torn-out images from newspapers, no surrealist juxtapositions. The focus instead is on minute detail, on forensic observation of the environment, both built and natural. Daniela’s idiosyncratic technique is part of a singular vision.
Some pictures display the obsessive outsider intensity of Richard Dadd or Madge Gill. Others exude the empathy and lyricism of East Sussex artist Annie Soudain, with whom Daniela shares a passion for the natural world.
“The show is an archive of places which hold memories and ideas of the past,” she tells me. One work, entitled The Empty Nest, shows a glowering castle framed by autumnal trees, bringing together the personal, the seasonal and the deep historical in a single energised image. The shattered sky offers a space where an eagle might soar or a sly wren ascend: both a monumental ruin and a site of quiet hope.
Exhibition runs 27 May to 7 June 2026, Wednesdays to Sundays, 11am to 5pm. Hastings Arts Forum, 20 Marine Court, St Leonards-on-Sea
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