Hi. I'm Anna Caione. I have Italian heritage and I was born in Melbourne and I am a visual artist.

I suppose I'm passionate about many things. I am a visual artist by nature. That's my cause. So I think being an artist, you become curious and so curiosity creates a whole gamut of interest. In many areas. And I suppose my main passion is art, but within that there are many layers. So it is for me it's history. Seri looking at a human interaction, the visual, the composition, the poetry.
So it's many things that I suppose that art beholds, which in effect continues to create my journey. And also I suppose my passion grows within that as an artist.
I have a it's, it's not a surface connection. It's a very deep connection. Both my parents migrated here in the fifties after World War Two, and at home we spoke Italian, but it was a dialect and it was a dialect from the Abruzzo region in central Italy. And I remember in when we went back to Italy as a family for the first time in 1974, I really as a young child, I discovered this wonderful place being this country, Italy.

And it was then that moment stayed with me for many years. And so when I reached my twenties, I wanted to learn proper Italian. And so I had the opportunity to study at the Academy of Arts in Turin and I followed my passion being art. And it was there where I not only learn to speak Italian well, but I also had the opportunity to dove into the world of Italy and its history and art and contemporary lifestyle Well, it's been an incredible whatever I create has my culture in it.

It might not be evident when one looks at the work, but it's really the the the textures and the layers. I mean, when I lived in Italy, I was inspired by the history and the the the layers of time that you find in objects and architecture. And with that, I feel that when I create my work, there's a process in which in some way which is not verbal, it's more innate, comes through my work.

And that's through the way I compose my artworks. They're very textural, as you sound objects. And sometimes the fabrics which I have collected on my journeys to Italy, and I embed those in the layers of the work. So there's lots of subtleties, I suppose, within my work that capture my heritage and my cultural background.
I think art has a very significant role in connecting people and cultures It's a very diverse area specialist, especially if we're looking at the contemporary world. The beauty about being in the contemporary world is that we can look at history. And within that there there are stories, there's psychology and there's the engagement of what happened in social structures.

But in the contemporary world, we can embrace that and create work which has new liberties and new discussions and engaging what's occurring in our current society today.

Diversity to me is a very sparse word, but I think it's having an understanding of differences that are in that that underlie humanity. And I think as an evolving society, we need to understand each other and to embrace all kinds of people. And that can even start simply by taking time to visit exhibitions, for example, where there are themes about diversity.

They are quite educational, not just from a theoretical aspect, but also in a visual aspect. But also going out to community events or engaging with somebody that you might meet even in a retail store These are the people that make up our society, and I think we need to have empathy and time and patience and also we need to be great listeners to engage diversity and make it a part of our life.