Olive tree trunks received my first artworks - grids of white threads, which I began to create as luminous writings left in nature. I love plants and have used them in developing my art practice, so when I'm not creating in nature I try to incorporate it in various ways in several artworks done indoors. I have occasionally worked with acanthus leaves, asphodels and other wildflowers, parkinsonias as well as various succulents.
I walk and connect points, record the thousands of steps, routes and distances. I use materials such as threads and paper tapes in order to develop ephemeral interventions in nature and the city. Occasionally I create constellations of paths and works spread over an area topographically as I did during my residency on the islet of Gozo, Malta in 2018 as resident artist of the European Capital of Culture Valletta 2018. It took 212,524 steps to create a series of works that make up a larger whole on the island. Some of them with children from local schools participating, while the majority of the interventions were done by me walking and laying out routes for local people to discover and then experience the artwork as if they were reading a map.
In 2016, in the villages of mountainous Rethymnon, I carried out a similar project on a smaller scale as part of an international art residency program. I created an installation simulating the landscape surrounding the listed monumental building of the Arkadi Monastery and developed a series of ephemeral works around its perimeter. There were interventions in historic mansions in neighboring villages, in sheepfolds and the local schools.
I have made projects in various types of buildings, from old mansions and monasteries to barns that I am particularly fascinated by, studying the information they provide so that it can be incorporated into the production process of a project, the same can be done for a wider network of buildings or sites where my interventions come and join them together. In many cases I find myself working somewhat topographically, creating condensers where they do not exist and reinforcing existing ones, making sets and larger structures.
The recent series of interventions in Lycabettus is such a case, a set of punctual interventions in this green area in the city centre, spreading continuously, being removed, repeated and in variations within a period of four months.
Recording the number of steps, routes, distances and in the case of the recent lock -down project, the hours of duration of an ephemeral intervention, is an important element of my work. In some cases the journey I make in nature with the information I collect becomes later an indoors installation. The "Slope" that I presented in my solo show in October of 2021 in FokiaNou Art Space, made up of 25,500 meters of thread was based on the kilometers I walked on five different days in the 2020 - 2021 quarantine, making the interventions from paper tape in Lycabettus.
Also in some projects the public's contribution to their realization and development has been important, such as in the installation "Endless Summer" that took place in the summer of 2019 at an abandoned hotel in Serifos island, Greece. Visitors to the exhibition shared their thoughts and memories of an endless summer in pencil on the walls of the building, complementing my initial intervention created with colored tapes and found objects.
The element of light beam is also found in many of my works, from the recent Lycabettus interventions and those in Malta, to the installation at the Ursuline Monastery in Tinos in 2017, where almost burning rays of silk thread, burned by the intense light, came through the windows to create a wider grid of light inside the historic building. Also in cases of old and abandoned buildings, I use my materials to heal what has been worn away and make up for what has been permanently lost, for the short lifespan of my intervention. It is a momentary architectural gesture of restoration without the ambition of time and duration.
I want to make works attempting to put people in a way to measure themselves and meditate in front of a larger and pre-existing structure. They can be accounted for as humble, at least in terms of the materials and life of the works, attempts at perception, understanding and inclusion in it. Measurement and light, pacing and nature, the healing and restoration of a landscape or a building, scale and geometry, the fragile and temporary element of my works constitute a constant search for what exists beyond, before and after us.