Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome our cover artist for the “Audacity” issue , Mariaceleste Arena of Sicily, a mixed‑media visual artist with particular fondness for hard pastels. In our feature article, Ancient and Modern: Nature and the Creative Feminine in the Artwork of Mariaceleste Arena, we explore four of her works that draw deeply from cultural history, mythology, and the ancient symbols of the Mother Goddess. Mariaceleste rekindles these archetypes through the heat of personal experience and intuition, forging a visual language where childhood wounds, ancestral stories, and feminine power converge in startling, tender, and often surreal forms.
In The donkey‑child and the elephant, a bullied child is pictured as a donkey with luminous inner life.
“I personally think it’s a bold work because I portrayed myself as a child in an unusual way, that is, as a donkey, an animal rarely depicted except in bucolic or satirical scenes. Unfortunately, there’s a tendency to consider donkeys stupid and slow: in reality, they are very intelligent and patient.”
The elephant beside her is a symbol of creativity, steeped in Sicilian history.
The other three artworks focus on the Mother Goddess. Mother Goddess I reimagines Neolithic reverence for pregnancy as the source of life, portraying her as a sprouting bulb whose curves and whimsy echo ancient fertility figures. An eagle merges with a butterfly to reveal the necessity of personal growth as the underpinning of motherhood in The Buttereagle. The Queen of the Female Power introduces a Medusa‑figure in the garments of the Minoan Snake Goddess, reclaiming the potency of the feminine gaze.
What unites these pieces is a fierce, imaginative audacity that fuses the representational with the symbolic: the fiery courage to create from one’s own symbolic universe rather than from trends or expectations. Mariaceleste’s figures are guardians, tricksters, protectors, and mirrors—each one insisting that personal mythmaking is not only an artistic act, but a form of survival.
View Mariaceleste’s imaginative artwork and read about her inspiration and process in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Mariaceleste Arena is an emerging visual artist from Sicily. Her work is based on the elaboration of subjects and themes inspired by Neolithic culture, outsider and Naive art. Arena has exhibited in numerous national and international physical and virtual exhibitions and her artworks have been published in numerous trade magazines and catalogues.
Some of the most important exhibitions include: the Biennale di Sondrio, Italy, 2024; the Virtual exhibition “Love”, Barbagelata Contemporary Art Foundation,2024; “Text-ure 2023”, CICA Museum, South Korea; “It’s Magic: A Beyond Experience–Photo Video and Visual Design”, Rome,I taly, 2022; Virtual exhibition “First World Digital Art Fair”, 2022; Ceci n’est pas un blasphème about Censored Arts, PAN (Palace of the Arts), Naples, 2021 and the 16th edition of the Careof Ricas Award, Milan, 2015.