The exhibition
Most of my work is experiential and I often use my image. More particularly, for the last 25 years my work is based on old personal items that I collect in my workshop, such as my dowry sheets, my shoes, photos, my old clothes, namely familiar objects that have completed their cycle and they are now in disuse.
These objects that act as an umbilical cord with my past, in the stream of time they are released from their usefulness and emerge the emotional load that relates me to them.
Taking this turn back in time, I retrieve engraved memories that still reach up to childhood experiences. Memories that were saved mostly in my absence and recorded in pockets of the unconscious. Each new addition awakens the previous ones.
I realize that at the same time there is also an emotional awareness of reality with mixed feelings, conflicts and tensions, to the point that many times I catch myself altering, distorting and finally reshaping my own memories, in terms o fmy desires and my wants. That being so, I want to express all these I carry within me and I call them “Unutterable burdens”, because they are unresolved, incomprehensible, and very powerful.
Lately, I have embraced a new object that has been accompanying me for years in my workshop, loaded with emotion like my clothes, the canvas board.
I am attracted by its materiality (it is a genius construction with structure), its autonomy and its long history. Spending time on a daily basis in my atelier which I simulate as a temple, I immerse myself in a laboring reality. Just one stimulus out of all these items is enough to start a project production adventure.
I highly treasure the feeling of each material I shape, so I let myself wander and play with it, invoking the instinct and the accidental, so that, beyond my own personal memories, the properties of the material and any inherent memories it might recall to be able to emerge.
Transparency is also one of the main elements that runs through all my work, especially the latest works with the detachments. It creates space and therefore time as well.
When, while designing a clothing, using a technique I peeled off part of the canvas coating and its fibers appeared, at that very moment I felt a great thrill emotion when the framework of the canvas was revealed and blended with my painted image. I automatically paralleled it with the human skeleton.
I felt exposing myself, it was as if anything impure that had been settled on me, that had hurt me, was drawn out of me, I experienced a catharsis.
At some point, I thought of throwing away any personal clothes I had gathered in the workshop to get rid of them and move on.
But I was overcome by an impulse and the next step was to tie them, the same way they tie the guts and offal of animals to make kokoretsia!
I fail to understand each time what guides me, what prevails, the material, the memories or the thematic?
The essence of all this exploring and insight is a merging that takes place between matter and memory, with many parallel and undefined processes.
All these emotions, the struggle with myself, the anxiety, the fear, the worry, the grief, the nostalgia, the social inequality, the climate change, I feel them articulated and transmuted through the artwork I create. Sometimes with humor and sarcasm, sometimes with irony, and sometimes through the dream.
This is how I redeem myself…
I may not have been relieved of many burdens that I bear, but at least through my art, I have been able to accept them, join hands with them, and ultimately enjoy it.
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Selected Works
