Blatt & Matonelli is a collaboration rooted in cultural storytelling, placemaking, and visual connection.

Blatt & Matonelli is a collaborative practice between artist Katherine Palella and multidisciplinary designer Sirena Varma. As two artists of migrant heritage, representing different waves of migration to Australia from the 1960s to today, our work is rooted in cultural storytelling, placemaking, and visual connection. We reimagine traditional tile-making practices through a contemporary lens, drawing on the aesthetics of the Mediterranean and Levant alongside our own lived experiences to explore identity, migration, and belonging through pattern and material.

Our practice spans ceramics, hand-crafted objects, graphic design, and public art, including projections and spatial installations that extend tile-based compositions into the architectural scale. Across these forms, we are interested in how tiles can move beyond static objects to become systems of pattern, carriers of memory, and tools for shaping place. We see tile not as a fixed craft medium, but as a flexible system capable of holding multiple narratives, scales, and forms.

Two women in a creative room with framed artwork on white paneled walls, a desk with art supplies, and a table with framed pictures.
Comparison of two decorative tiles with different patterns and their names: Blatt, an Arabic word for tile, and Matonelli, a Sicilian word for tile.
Person pressing a metal stamp onto square tiles of chocolate or clay on a worktable, surrounded by tools and supplies.

Photography by Kate O’Sullivan

  • Katherine Palella is a multidisciplinary artist with extensive experience working on creative projects, public art works, exhibitions and events.

    Katherine paints abstracts that explore internal and somatic topography of affect. This practice lives in the realm of aesthetics and form, attempting to illicit and access bodily memory through colour, composition and gesture.

    With a strong interest in critical theory and collaboration, Katherine’s background is primarily in DIY approaches via Artist Run Initiatives Magand-jin Creatives for Palestine, Small Lakes, 4C Collective and Conduit Arts, and collaborative work with musicians and videographers.

    Visit Katherine’s website.

  • Sirena Varma is a multidisciplinary designer and artist who works across the visual arts, graphic design and exhibition design from Beirut, based in Magan-djin (Brisbane). Through processes grounded in collaboration and co-creation, Sirena brings forth evocative engagements on cultural care, collective memory and visual story-telling. Sirena’s design work has been featured in Beirut Design Week, Dutch Design Week, Frame Magazine and the Institute of Modern Art. 

    Formerly an architect and now a graphic designer, Sirena is the co-founder and creative director of Twig Collaborative. She has spent over a decade refining her creative and collaborative processes. Through Twig Collaborative, Sirena has worked with clients from major global brands and academic institutions such as Uber, Beirut Art Center, Parsons The New School, and University of Chicago.

    Sirena’s interdisciplinary praxis is shaped by creative processes that embrace engaging with a range of mediums and collaborators, alongside inspiration drawn from her Lebanese, Palestinian, German and Indian heritage and personal experience with migration.

    Visit Sirena’s website.