Entrances, exits and immortality
One enters a room in darkness. Transparent, black, silk-like fabric billows and dissolves one's sense of boundary, other edges of space disappear in soft-edged blackness. Immediately one senses an evocation of the sublime and of a space beyond measure-a presentation of the unpresentable. Di Mauro's installation Evanescence, 1993,1 suggests that although it is located in a 'void' there is an escape to another world. An eerie quiet pervades the room and a spot-lit copper ladder reaches resolutely upwards towards a higher plane, 'another world'.
Di Mauro's installation was comprised of space, objects (pool, ladder, a pile of crystals) and paintings on carpet underlay; two on the wall and two resting between floor and wall. Symbols painted on smaller 'mats' of carpet underlay abounded, sliding between wall and floor, linking the two planes, curving the space and providing a symbolic connection between earth and air. Di Mauro uses carpet-underlay as "a metaphor for the process of pulling away surface layers (of life, ourselves) in a process of self-examination.''
2 Several concepts dominate this artist's current work: the confrontation and struggle with the self and with self-acceptance and the transcendental and philosophical questions on the possibility of after-life.
Labyrinth, the first of the four paintings, which were part of the installation, depicts the ancient symbol of a labyrinth worked in yellow. This symbol has long represented the earth as mother, the uterus of the earth and its seed; or life as a puzzling journey, a place of ritual procession from childhood into adulthood; and a sacred site to bury the dead.3 In this way the labyrinth can be seen as a symbol of both death and rebirth and is descriptive "of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline