Allegra Hicks Transforms a Landmark Church on Italy’s Ischia Island with a Powerful Installation

The multifaceted oeuvre of Allegra Hicks extends across mediums and methods. Her creative vision informs furniture, fabrics, and rugs, while her output as an artist extends across painting, tapestry, and mixed media. Often, the two worlds collide in powerful installations that reverberate against gallery walls, and as in the case of her current exhibition, “Divinazione,” juxtaposed with the historical environs of the stunning Castello Aragonese d’Ischia in Italy.

“The place is such an extraordinary conglomerate of different times,” Hicks says of the castle that hugs a towering waterfront cliff on the volcanic island of Ischia, overlooking the Gulf of Naples in Italy. Churches on the property range from a 12th-century chapel to the bombed-out remains of a circa-1300s cathedral and the 18th-century Church of the Immaculate Conception.

Building off a work Hicks installed in the crypt at Church of La Misericordiella in Naples in 2024, the installation takes its cues from the deconsecrated site’s dramatic architecture where a Greek cross is flanked by altars on the left and right while a soaring ceiling is topped by a vast cupola with eight windows that flood the room with natural light. The centerpiece is a large-scale sculpture draped in a blood-red velvet that punctuates the crisp whiteness of the space. “Red is an extraordinary color,” says the artist. “Our blood is red. It is such a primary, fantastic, potent color… but that white is not soft; it’s really strong as well.”

While palette is a through-line, so too is shape. “The drop is fluidity. There’s something incredibly fragile but also incredibly strong. It also represents blood, it represents life. And blood in a place like Naples suggests all the miracles of all the different saints,” she says of the main artwork, which was installed on a specially crafted altar to elevate the piece against the room’s enormous scale. “Being in that space, it changed completely. It’s probably at its best there.”

Elsewhere in the long, narrow room are works that continue the narrative Hicks started with her exhibition during Venice Glass Week. A stretching center table holds mandala-shaped resin sculptures as well as embroidered canvases that depict body parts in a nod to ex-votos, customary silver pieces left at churches in Italy as a prayer or gratitude for healing.

Additionally, Hicks created three new works for the installation—a painting with a mandala cut-out and embroidered tapestry are suspended high in the main cathedral so viewers take in the works with almost a sense of reverence while a newly conceived iron sculpture in an abstract drop-shape outline stands amongst the illuminated ruins.

“When I arrived there, it was very clear to me what I needed to do,” she says of the full spectrum of “Divinazione” that is more a celebration of spirituality versus a study on religion. “When one hurts oneself, one bleeds, but the fact that one bleeds, its a demonstration of life. At the same time, the drop is such an extraordinary archetype that is not only a liquid, but solid as well. Someone was calling it liquid love, which is a beautiful thing to say.”