Marina Patalano

A cardboard box lid with written text 'Gloria' and drawings of colourful beads.

Marina Patalano is a multidisciplinary designer and maker based in London.

As a practicing magician and spiritualist, her work aims to narrate stories; cautionary, speculative, existential, and mythical, to try to understand the world that we live in and our position within it. Her practice aims to reflect perspectives and ideas that go further than our initial thoughts and understandings of objects, spaces, the people and cultures that impact and affect us. While narrating new stories embedded with speculative subject matter, it’s about the experiential, encompassing her own experiences and involving others in this journey.

Through her stage performance and spiritual work and specialising in solely using vintage fabrics and materials, her intention is to preserve storytelling, folklore and craft, as well as offering guidance towards self-actualisation and healing.

Marina is a recipient of the Burberry Design Scholarship.

A woman in a green jacket and blue trousers holding a red, pink and black paper cut-out collage mask in front of her face.

The word ‘occult’, derived from the Latin occulere, means anything hidden or concealed; secret; communicated only to the initiated; recondite; mysterious. And this is what my practice is about. The secrecy, the mystery, the clandestine wonder of it all. Of magic and magick. A world of experience and knowledge that seems inaccessible until you choose to access it.

Drawing on the folklore and traditions of my Italian heritage, my practice explores the idea of a conversation with the dead through art, utilising artistic practice to communicate the most unseen thing that surrounds us all, and the phenomena of my late mother being my current teacher.

I invite you to join me while I share this journey with you, But remember that magic is a perception. Magic hides in every part of our lives,

You must use your imagination to see it, to feel it.

After all, what's a magician without her audience?

Statement Image Credit:

Mask by Marina Patalano for RCA Fashion X Share Community.

A collaborative project between artists with learning disabilities and autism from Share Community and designers from the Royal College of Art.

Project Leaders, Ellen Fowles and Anne Ferial.

Shot by Esme Moore, Assisted by Lucy Bilcock.