BIO
Laila Marie Costa is a Melbourne based visual artist, jeweller, zine publisher, curator and musician.
Her working process is based on collecting the waste and refuse of consumer culture and allowing the materials to infer the form. The debris is sorted and arranged by various time tested and obsessive methodologies. She works across collage, assemblage, installation, jewellery and occasionally sound. Her creations are informed by her heritage, domesticity, feminism, environmental issues, art history, materiality and humour. The nebulous spaces between fine art, craft and design are the areas of that intrigue and inspire the bulk of her investigations.
She completed a Bachelor of Fine at R.M.I.T in 1992 and a Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts at the Victoria College of the Arts in 2003. Costa has taught at Swinburne University in the Arts and Supported Learning departments and as a gallery consultant at Studio Ingot. In 2016 she was awarded the Italian Services Institute Australia International Fellowship to study micro-mosaic and macro art projects in Italy and Barcelona. She currently works as a project manager and curator for community art programs based in judicial buildings.
In 2018 Costa co-founded TempContemp, a contemporary jewellery project space within Northcity4, Brunswick, where she was a studio artist until December 2019. TempContemp is now a nomadic entity and she is currently an artist in residence at East Brunswick Village.
Costa has exhibited locally and internationally, predominantly in artist run initiatives and completed an artist in residence in Argentina in 2012. In 2020 she was selected for group exhibitions in Russia and China.
Her jewellery is stocked at Studio Ingot, Melbourne.