Vittoria Di Stefano primarily works in sculpture and installation. Employing a methodology of generative material experimentation, her work explores themes of liminality, transformation and desire, with a particular emphasis on domestic space and intimate materiality. Using a diverse palette of materials, Di Stefano explores how experiences generated through art practice can produce new knowledge about everyday materiality, disrupt received cultural meanings, and critically engage with the political and cultural inferences of materiality. 'Pears on a Willow' is a site-specific sculptural installation for Linden New Art that explores the poetics of domestic spaces and their embedded histories. The work is a result of Di Stefano’s research into two historical narratives: that of the Linden site itself, a family home originally built for Jewish immigrant Moritz Michaelis in the nineteenth century; and the journey of the artist’s own Polish grandparents, who emigrated to Australia after the Second World War. While these two histories differ in circumstance and timeframe, their stories intertwine and overlap in their discussion of trauma, perseverance, survival and love. The exhibition explores the complexity of personal histories, the unreliable nature of memory, and the poetics of the in-between states that characterise our domestic spaces and lived realities. [Images > Vittoria Di Stefano, Pears on a Willow [detail], 2024, Reclaimed furniture and homewares, plaster, wax, resin, handmade felt, borax crystals, feathers, fur, fabric trims. Photograph: Shelley Xue.]