Part 1: Artist Interview Series
In this series, we delve into the inspirations, processes, and visions of the artists featured in Dissonant Beauty, on view at the Rejina Pyo store until April 30, 2025.
Part 1 focuses on the work of Maddalena Zadra and Six Dots Design, highlighting their creative journeys and themes.
Maddalena Zadra
Maddalena Zadra is a London-based Italian artist working across painting, drawing, printmaking, textiles, and installations. Her work explores themes of tactility, sensuality, and playfulness, subtly balancing vulnerability and eroticism. Drawing inspiration from diverse cultures and historical periods, she weaves together layered narratives that invite open interpretation.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about your art practice?
My practice spans painting, drawing, printmaking, textiles, and installation, with a strong focus on process and experimentation. I’m guided by instinct and material curiosity, allowing techniques to evolve and overlap organically. There’s both a physical and emotional engagement in the way I work, building, layering, pulling things apart and putting them back together, often responding to texture, colour, and rhythm as they emerge.
Growing up in Italy, I was surrounded by a strong visual culture that shaped my sensitivity to composition and aesthetics from an early age. On my mother’s side, my family has worked for generations as makers and restorers of traditional flags, a craft rooted in precision, care, and symbolism. That heritage is something I carry with me, especially in my textile work, where I continue to explore and reinterpret these techniques.
I explore themes of tactility, sensuality, and playfulness, often balancing vulnerability and eroticism. These are closely tied to my own identity and lived experience, particularly as a young woman navigating how the body, intimacy, and emotion are expressed and received. There’s a quiet tension in my work between exposure and protection, between softness and strength, that reflects the complexities of selfhood. Through gesture, texture, and layered imagery, I aim to create spaces that are open, reflective, and tender, where contradictions can exist without needing resolution.
"I spend a lot of time simply looking at the work, waiting for the moment when I feel confident enough to take the next step. It’s a process built on patience, intuition, and trust."
Q: How would you describe your style or creative process? What draws you to particular materials, colours, techniques etc?
My process is intuitive and rooted in a deep attention to texture and materiality. I’m drawn to the tactile qualities of surfaces, often blending traditional and contemporary techniques to build layered and expressive compositions. Each stage of making feels meaningful, whether it’s slowly building up colour through layers of paint, or using mono-printing for its raw, almost primitive immediacy.
I find a quiet beauty in pure lines and expressive drawing, simple yet full of movement and energy. Sewing and thread allow me to collage and shape forms, creating connections between elements while adding softness and intimacy to the work. Colour is a central part of my process as well—finding the right combination is instinctive, and often I spend long periods just looking, waiting for the work to tell me what it needs next.
Q: What themes, concepts or processes do you tend to explore?
I am interested in cultural storytelling. My work reflects on the fragility of identity and heritage, weaving together personal and collective narratives. I tend to work instinctively and enjoy keeping a sense of playfulness throughout my process. I’m drawn to layering different techniques and paying close attention to detail—especially in how colours interact. I spend a lot of time simply looking at the work, waiting for the moment when I feel confident enough to take the next step. If that feeling isn’t there, I often need to start over. It’s a process built on patience, intuition, and trust.
"I often think of my work as visual poetry, where clarity meets ambiguity, and balance coexists with imbalance."
Q: Can you tell us about the pieces showcased?
These works don’t carry a fixed meaning—they’re part of my ongoing conversation with playfulness, vulnerability, and sensuality. There’s a sense of nostalgia and poetic expression that runs through them.
Each piece is an invitation to reflect, to pause, and to find your own narrative within it.
Q: What does beauty mean to you when it comes to art?
I grew up in the Italian Alps, where my sisters and I spent our days in the garden, making things by hand and inventing new worlds with whatever we had around us. That early sense of creativity—rooted in play, nature, and resourcefulness—shapes how I see beauty today. I believe beauty can be found in the everyday, and that artists have the role of highlighting what already surrounds us. For me, it lives in the feelings a piece can evoke—in the details, the imperfections, the layers, and the process behind the work.
Six Dots Design
Six Dots creates bespoke furniture from its North London workshop, embracing the beauty of imperfection in every piece. The studio operates on the conviction that all objects - like people - contain inherent stories waiting to be expressed. This belief is manifested through their intentionally handcrafted creations.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about your art practice?
Six Dots Design aims to promote: self expression, imperfection and self determination inside and beyond the home environment. We use expressive forms, raw materials and visible imperfections to challenge established norms of the interiors we exist within. We hope that when someone owns one of our pieces they feel a little bit more like themselves, accepted as who they are and empowered to do things for themselves.
Q: How would you describe your style or creative process? What draws you to particular materials, colours, techniques etc?
We work exclusively with aluminum. It’s a material we chose because of its sustainable potential, its softness and its sculptural qualities. The aluminium gives us a unique identity that acts as a framework for our creative expression and discovery. All of our work is designed for expression and feeling. When we design pieces we aim for them to feel precious and to transcend the emotional qualities of a mass produced object.
"All of our work is designed for expression and feeling. When we design pieces we aim for them to feel precious and to transcend the emotional qualities of a mass-produced object."
Q: What themes, concepts or processes do you tend to explore?
We never want to over-intellectualise our work. We want our pieces to be seen and felt at face value and not need to be read into any further. Our work is broadly a rebellion against the anti-decorative movement and is an exploration of feelings and emotions within the home environment.
Q: Can you tell us about the pieces showcased?
The sewing desk is an exploration of how we can elevate and express ourselves through relatively mundane, everyday use objects and pieces of furniture. The pea head lamp and candelabra have become some of our most known pieces and counter the over-chromed norm of furniture today. The lamp is a new piece we are developing, with this we are pushing the metal to be soft and warm, almost friendly by shaping it and forming it to feel almost like paper.
“Beauty is a trigger for connection, connection is really where we bond with the people and objects around us.”
Q: What is the inspiration behind this body of work?
These pieces all form part of a variety of bodies of work that we have developed over the course of several years. Our clients and customers tend to be curators, designers or artists in their own right, even if they don’t do it for a living. With respect to this, with each piece we try to push them into accepting something or challenge them in questioning something, for instance with the candelabra and serving tray we leave the welds visible to challenge the idea that this form of craft is somehow lesser than a woodworker leaving visible joinery on a cabinet.
Q: What does beauty mean to you when it comes to art?
Beauty is a trigger for connection, connection is really where we bond with the people and objects around us. I think art being beautiful is part of its toolset for building connections between it and its audience and the audience members themselves.
Visit Dissonant Beauty at The Rejina Pyo Store until April 30th.
37 Upper James St, London W1F 9DG
