GINA DECAGNA: “COLLECTING AND ASSEMBLING”

AN AMERICAN ARTIST IN LONDON REPURPOSES CARDBOARD WITH A SENSE OF AESTHETICS AND SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

by Edward M. Gómez

Gina DeCagna is an American artist who has been living in London for the past five years. During the pandemic period, while making her living in the publishing field, writing and editing, she found herself pulling back from making art. More recently, though, she has returned to developing her ideas not only about what kinds of works to create but also about how to do so in ways that recognize and respond to some of the most urgent concerns of our time, including sustainability, reducing waste, and protecting the natural environment.

A work by Gina DeCagna from the “Pressure of the Return” series. About this piece, the artist says, “Appealing to organic architecture, this installation was improvised from cardboard collected from the streets of West Philadelphia in 2016 and later reconfigured and reinstalled in New York City in 2018.” Photo courtesy of the artist

DeCagna earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she studied English, creative writing, and art. Her art classes introduced her to the rule-breaking, tradition-busting attitudes of modernism and more recent, contemporary art forms, but when she went on to pursue a master’s degree at Goldsmiths, a division of the University of London that is well known for its art programs, she recalls being “trained in a completely different way.”