Migration Nation

Designer and visual artist Daniela Attard, known as ielladoodle, hosted Migration Nation, a multimedia art exhibit at Spazju Kreattiv. The exhibit deals with several important issues in both a worldwide and Maltese context. THINK visits the exhibit and speaks with Iella about her work and her time as a UM student.

Iella holds a bachelor’s degree in Art History from the University of Malta and a master’s in Communication Design from Kingston University. She has since gone on to work with companies such as Cartoon Network, Warner Brothers, HBO Max, and other notable brands. Iella tells me that getting her degree at UM was ‘truly the beginning of my career, in more ways than one’.

While she notes that having a choice in study units to follow was much more limited at the time, she ended up ‘taking home a lot more than expected’. In fact, her knowledge of symbolism and how it can form layers of meaning in art is very apparent in her work. That said, Iella believes she was a ‘terrible student’ even though she was ‘very interested in the subject’ since she often fell asleep in lectures after having stayed up all night drawing – quite the contrary, it is clear that her passion for art both filled and fueled her life.

The Skate Park Graffiti Zone

Her other choice in artistic expression, however, is what I was especially interested in talking about. My first encounter with Iella’s work was on the walls of a pedestrian tunnel in Msida. The piece has since been painted over, along with other graffiti from that particular area. Ironically, just a few days after it was covered, it was replaced with verses from the famous Dylan Thomas poem, ‘Do not go gentle into the good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light’.

Although Iella’s graffiti spans beyond the bounds of the skate park, the area seems to be her favourite haunt. She recalls how, during her last year of university, she and her graffiti group had almost managed to cover the entirety of it with their work. Compared to an exhibit at an art gallery, Iella thinks graffiti has its unique benefits:  ‘Street art is more accessible and removes the barrier to entry when it comes to galleries.’ Iella thinks of her graffiti as an advertisement for her work, which ‘can be both political and aesthetical’.

Migration Nation

Despite this, Iella reserves her most political work for museum exhibits. Migration Nation is Iella’s second exhibit at Spazju Kreattiv, her first being Dying Planet back in 2022. Dying Planet featured a series of illustrations and paintings inspired by the climate-crisis anxiety. Climate change is a prevalent theme in Migration Nation too, but as the name implies, the main issue that Iella addresses is migration within the Maltese context.

The exhibition, which ran between September and November 2024, was quite large, filling three adjoining rooms. Yet, each piece had a vital and poignant place, contributing to the exhibition’s message. In the first few paintings, Iella presents the process of migration through barn swallow birds fleeing by boat from wildfire, crop failure, and floods, all in vibrant red forms. In my interview with Iella, she tells me that she chose birds because she realised people would be more likely to empathise with them; ‘we’re so desensitised to human suffering and the migrant situation, especially in Malta. It feels like pressure, constantly building.’

My favourite painting is among these first few. It features a three-headed flying Cerberus bird as the focal point, while two typical birds look up at it from each side. It fills me with dread, but there’s something else too – a wider feeling that I got from the entire exhibit.

I have a list of questions to think about as I walk through the gallery. One of these is, ‘How do you feel this contributes to community-wide discussions?’. It’s a good question, especially for a topic as important as migration, and I do think her work would contribute greatly to such a discussion; I’m just not sure how to put Iella’s work into words. This exhibit makes you feel small. In the wide coolness of the stone walls, under the eyes of that terrifying, magnificent Cerberus bird, you feel small.

And while it’s admittedly not a comfortable feeling, I think it’s important for everyone to remember it once in a while. We forget how desperately we like to feel as removed from the birds in these paintings, yet how little it would take for us to become these migrants on someone else’s shores.

Among the paintings of barn swallows, there are also copper etchings containing the same subject. They aren’t as vibrant as the paintings, but they make their impact. They solidify the story, historicise it somehow. One of them, The Drowned Migrants, shows a singular swallow lifting its head to the sky amidst a pile of corpses. Its caption reads, ‘So many of us died’.

Collaborating Artists

Besides Iella’s work, a separate room displays the animated work of invited artist Christian de Souza Jensen (artist name SeaPuppy). The short film tells a similar story, birds fleeing from a fire, and is accompanied by frenetic music that drives home the immediacy of the issues brought up in Iella’s work. The final room of the exhibit has a different feeling from the rest. The main attraction is a large luzzu made of paper boats around which visitors are invited to leave their own paper boats. The trail of boats flows around the room, and in certain places, you have to step over them, but the visual effect is beautiful.

There is also an installation of posters by different artists on the themes of Migration Nation done in collaboration with the Malta Community of Illustrators. The room is hopeful and highlights the importance of collaboration in solving or at least starting a discussion about these issues. In this vein, the caption on Iella’s final painting reads: ‘The future is unknown, but we have to keep trying.’

The entire collection of artworks for Migration Nation is collected in an online catalogue found here. Other works by Iella may be viewed through her website here.