Grotto Girl is the culminating exhibition of Louisa Chircop’s artist-led residency and community outreach project at MUŻA, Malta’s National Community Art Museum. Emerging from an intensive process of research, participatory workshops, and site-specific engagement, the exhibition brings together individual and collective narratives in a symbolic and immersive environment that examines the layered notions of identity, belonging, and cultural inheritance.
Central to the conceptual framework of Grotto Girl is MUŻA’s courtyard well, reimagined by Chircop as both metaphor and material anchor. Drawing from her own experience growing up in a post-WWII Maltese immigrant family in Sydney, Australia, Chircop uses this symbolic well as a site for excavation—both literal and metaphorical—of the cultural memory and stories that lie beneath the surface of personal and national histories. Identifying herself as the “Grotto Girl,” she constructs a living installation that acts as a contemporary grotto: a space shaped by the voices, gestures, and hands of a community in dialogue with its past and present.
Throughout the residency, Chircop facilitated a series of hands-on, community-centered workshops in which clay served as the primary medium of expression. Participants were invited to shape their experiences into tangible forms, creating sculptural objects that carry the imprint of lived memory. The use of clay—as both a tactile, responsive material and a metaphor for transformation—foregrounds the relationship between identity and process. It is through this process of making that participants engaged in acts of remembrance, resilience, and redefinition.
The resulting installation is both an artwork and an archive: a space that gathers the collective output of the residency while also reflecting Chircop’s broader artistic practice, which is rooted in psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial thought. The grotto itself becomes a porous vessel—a site where individual contributions remain distinct yet interwoven, a space where personal trajectories intersect with communal heritage.
Grotto Girl echoes the performative and celebratory spirit of Maltese festi, yet it resists the closure of spectacle. Instead, it invites contemplation, connection, and continuity. It honours the deeply personal within the shared, foregrounding artistic process as a means of both individual inquiry and collective healing.
Ultimately, the exhibition offers a sanctuary of reflection—a space where stories are not only told but held. In doing so, Grotto Girl positions the exhibition as a living site of community engagement, cultural reckoning, and artistic transformation.
Produced in collaboration with Marie Gallery 5
Exhibition is supported by:
Heritage Malta, Alka Ceramics, Rathenart Printing, Gemelli Framing, Marie Gallery5, Zamcor Media, Australian High Commission Malta
📆12th May 2025- 29th June 2025
📍MUŻA, Malta
Also check out other Arts events in Valletta, Exhibitions in Valletta, Workshops in Valletta.
