Ornella Ridone is a self-taught artist born in 1955 in Saluzzo, Northern Italy, where she began her creative quest with Drawing, at Brera Fine Arts Academy of Milan, and Fiber and Textile Art in Poland where she had a residency with different fiber artists in Warsaw.
Soon after she moved to Mexico City and absorbed all the turmoil and lush of the art scene there. Fieldwork in Anthropology with indigenous people combined with Land Art apprenticeship, both inspired her to search for the essential and primitive in her artwork. She started incorporating space into the weaved structures realizing empty forms in space: cocoons, huts, chrysalids... any kind of shelters to plunge in a new timeless dimension.
After 2000 she went back to bidimension with embroidery. That produced a shift in her imaginary expression: the entire world of figures drawn with threads began flowing out from a vast inner space highlighted by lots of deep memories. Embroidery helped her to established a link with my feminine ancestors, those women from the Alps mountains and Hungary that used to decorate with red threads their dowry and dresses. The project of multiple installations Hilo Rojo 3047 is dedicated to them.
Embroidering dresses has been her way to focus the gaze on feminine existence: abuse against women, aggression towards young girls obliged to marry, home violence, incestuous practices as in the exhibitions:La Novia-Niéa (2006) and Mis Cicatrices (2016）.
Dresses appear and disappear cyclically in her work: sometimes they are cut in stripes, sometimes they hang in a 20 mt high window, at times filled with stuffing like dolls with no head, other times they are cut like paper-patterns to sew or even they are stiched together in very large surfaces recalling a textile mosaic to represent a 17 mt long Mexican flag, as in the installation De Sangre a Savia (2018) and Allé Abajo/Down Below (2018).With these two flags installations, she started her inquiry about national identities. Her focus broaden, from herself to her family system and from her family system to the people around her in this more and more globalized world. Conflicts between nations, boundaries, immigration from one country to another seems priority questions to analyze and pointing out in contemporary art making. The frequent outcomings of racism and emargination are very concerning items in her present work, from the times of Por-Dios-Eros installation about homeless people in 2013.
In the last years, she have participated as well in a collective project, Matria with the Spanish curator, Pablo Rico, that melt artistic creation with urban vegetables gardening in Oaxaca, the city where she currently live and work in Mexico. Interacting more and more with living elements of earth, water, fire and plants brought new suggestions to her artwork that she have been expressing with the media of performances and videos.