portfolio
Artist Statement
I am drawn to “intermediate spaces” - sleeping-waking, memory-reality, surface-depth - and their dual character. I am exploring the concept of “ the creature ”, the hybrid form. Through an abstraction process of deconstruction and reconstruction of the form and with a slightly humorous touch, I create my own creatures. Fluid volumes of stylized memories/ stylized forms of blurred memories. An organic language emerges, becoming alive through its continuous evolution in terms of color palette, scale, weight and material. The hunging sculptures emphasise the existance of the intermediate place they exist in, where opposing forces lift them up in the air, and sometimes grounds them on earth.
Memory and its alterations, sexuality and embodied femininity are concepts that determine both the process and the result of my visual practice.
Dominant materials in my work are fabric, clay, the body, alongside animation, which I use with a “gentle disrespect”, allowing happy accidents to have an important role in the result. The process of creation is a continuous game, which sometimes guides me and sometimes I define it. The resulting environments follow an internal narrative and create a flow in the space by highlighting its key words.
Mīres , 2023
Alexia Psaradeli’s Mīres recounts timeless stories of the “Fates of Thighs”, paying homage to all the femininities that have been enclosed throughout time, literally or metaphorically.
In the Balkan Peninsula, legends passed down from generation to generation speak of women’s sacrifices as necessary to erect a structure. The arched bridge of Arta in the17th century – a popular folktale in Greece – was completed by human sacrifice as after repeated unsuccessful attempts, the master builder found his wife at the foundation of the bridge. In such oral traditions, the body of the female mate is not only the cornerstone of the structure but also the alibi for a sacrificial femicide, where the resilience of the female body reinforces the perpetual stability of the structure. Additionally, these traditions are mirrored in Michel Foucault’s writings on “obedient bodies” and his reference to the power of authority exercised by one body over another – what he termed ‘biopower.’1
In Alexia Psaradeli’s ceramic thighs, organic matter – soil transformed into a malleable form – transfigures into a soft narrative structure complementary to its essence as building material. The ceramic thighs behave like the “armour” of an invertebrate body that feeds from the inside constantly weaving its cocoon or molding its ever-hardening, protective shell. Using molds of different femininities, Psaradeli creates memory containers, echoing the myth of the tradition from the island of Corfu that wanted craftsmen to mold the thighs of their wives to form roof tiles. The thighs, as the defining sign of the female body, go from being the foundation to the crowning of an entire edifice, a home, a Femme Maison.2
Mīres also connote the three Fates of ancient Greek mythology, as the word for thigh (miròs) and fate (míra) are close homophones in Greek. Lachesis, one of the Fates - all daughters of Necessity – stands on her knees, holding raffle tickets on her thighs and handing out people’s allotted destiny.
Together with Clotho who spins the thread of life, and Atropos who seals destiny, the three Fates symbolize the inevitability and necessity of our actions.3 But there is also the good fate, Aisha – the one who brings good fortune – who acts as a universal regulating principle, bringing order, balance, and harmony to the world.
In the central installation of the exhibition, women’s identities (or fragments thereof) are drawn and “ woven” together – echoing the Fates’ weaving – into a single mesh, a single collective narrative. Empowered, the “Fates of Thighs” invite the exploration of issues, ranging from the politics of gender and sexual desire to bodily memory, resistance, and the formation of collective identities.
Finally, the thighs in Psaradeli’s drawings and sculptures, as fragmented parts of the female body, echo the feminist anthropologist Emily Martin: ‘ it is difficult for women to feel as “whole people” productive and reproductive at the same time, when the current structure of workplaces does not make it easy for any woman to live with her bodily functions, regardless of whether she is menstruating, pregnant or menopausal’.4
Today we live in urban landscapes built by men for men and as a result women’s needs in public spaces are not accounted for, since a woman’ s sense of inclusion can only arise when her biological, social, and political bodies can be in harmony. Until this is realized, Mīres will continue to be transmitters of narratives of the embodied self.
Vicky Tsirou Art Historian, Curator
Translated by: Stefanos Gandolfo
1 Pourkos, Marios, editor. The Body as Locus of Experiences, Identities and Social Meanings, Athens, Okto, 2017, 135.
2 Reference to Louise Bourgeois series of sketches, Femme Maison, 1946-1947
3 Plato, Republic, Translated by N. M. Skouteropoulos, Athens, Polis, 212, 616b - 619a
4 Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body, 1989, p. 100-101, Boston: Beacon Press
Mīres of the Cyclades, 2024
“Mīres of the Cyclades” is the last chapter of the Mīres segment of Alexia Psaradelis’ work. Modularly articulated through sculptures, ceramic works, installations and drawings, Psaradeli’s Mīres create a shell-shelter that encloses narratives of friction/fragmentation as well as tenderness. Artfully playing on the consonance of the words “fates” [mīres] and “thighs” [mīrì] in Greek while alluding to the tradition of pottery on the island of Sifnos, the artist’s contemporary ceramic sculptures narrate the “Fates of Thighs”, the allegorical or real stories of fragility and empowerment of women and femininities.
Drawing on the folk tradition that tile artisans molded roof tiles on women’s thighs, the artist adopts the same approach and transforms organic matter into a malleable narrative or building material. Sometimes in pairs, as in the Mīres work, and sometimes as standalone or stitched singles, as in the Union fait la force works, women’s thighs create a porous “armor” of the multiple roles that a woman has had to wear on a daily basis through time. As the clay dries and hardens and the glaze settles in, every “thigh’s fate [mīra tou mīrou]” and every female identity becomes armored.
In Greek mythology, the nymphs Cyclades, daughters of the titans Oceanus and Tethys, “provoked” their fate by angering Poseidon, who punitively transformed them into islands. The geological record shows that the “emergence” of the Cyclades was caused by seismic, geological upheavals of the Aegean or Aegis, a single and indivisible landmass of land that covered the area of the present-day Aegean Sea, extending between the Ionian Sea, Asia Minor and the southern coast of Crete and so from the ‘fragmentation’ of the Aegean, the Cyclades were born. The Cyclades nymphs, as fragments of mother earth or an outgrowth of some god’s wrath against feminine entities, are reflected in the trilogy of works Unions (fragments of femininities).
Taking as reference the women mourners of Mani and Crete, the artist explores in the works of Lamentiles the inextricable link between the feminine gender and the care not only for the home but also for the community. The mourner, the first woman to acquire a public voice through the praise of the dead, is an eerie yet intimate figure. Charged with the heavy duty of mourning and skillfully bending the boundaries of fatalism, she honors the dead while she relieves the pain of the family and the community through her lamentation. At the same time, the mourner expresses grievances, injustices and unspoken truths, gaining a position of influence. In her own Lamentations, Psaradeli employs the canvas of the structural grid as another pentagram in order to incorporate the ceramic thighs as notes in space or visual illustrations of hendecasyllabic or dodecasyllabic lamentations. In this context, the Mīres also refer by association to the Three Fates or Moirai of ancient Greek mythology. Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos were charged with a specific role in determining the lives of mortals: the first to weave the thread of life, the second to distribute people’s lots and the third to inevitably seal their destiny.
The series of wall drawings entitled Femme Maisons (Women’s Homes) are not free interpretations of the folk practice of making tiles on the molds of women’s thighs, as a first reading would suggest. Instead, the drawings comment directly or indirectly on the limitations of a woman’s identity in her domestic environment. ‘Built-in’ bodies, limbs that protrude and bodies that are present through their absence, buried under a pile of tiles confirm Sartre’s anti-Cartesian position that the body is the self and that the self is the body.
Finally, expanding on the philosopher’s dictum that the body is the unmediated form of our existence, Psaradeli’s Fates of the Cyclades emphasizes that the body, not only in the carnal sense, but also in its social, political and biological substance, houses - like the fragments of ceramic thighs - our embodied memory, trauma and pleasure, proposing care as a counterweight to (her) stories of crushing.
Vicky Tsirou
Art Historian, Curator
Translated by: Stefanos Gandolfo
Elements, 2024 sifnian soil, water, branches in situ installtion
Union fait la force, 2024 ceramics, epoxic glue dimensions vary
| s , 2019
“Every time the center of gravity is guided in a straight line, the limbs describe curves that complement and extend the basically simple movement. Many times when the marionettes are merely shaken arbitrarily, they are transformed into a kind of rhythmic movement that in itself is very similar to the dance.”
Heinrich Von Kleist, On the Marionette Theatre
Fabric. Multiple folds. Modifications. The hues and shades of pink create mysterious creatures; fluid volumes unravel successively in space and time. These are the inhabitants living between the folds. The power that elevates them in the air is greater than that which grounds them on the earth.
The folds are experienced not as an act of completion but as an expression of an endless process of evolution. The folds’ interior and exterior create a dancing rhythm revealing a narrative.
Contemporary Swamps , 2020
“ Swamps are experimental labs where ideas and organisms have the luxury of being out of the spotlight and imagination can mutate and mate”
Stirring the Mud On Swamps,Bogs and Human imagination
Barbara Hurd
Swamps, as transition areas, neither totally land nor water, symbolise a flexible, open ended infustructure that is open to experiments, diversity, hybridity and are hosts of ‘edge species’ that have adapted to spend their lives in the strip between two communities. These qualities are important stepping stones for present and future relations between humans, nations, mankind towards nature.
Swamps are related to the circular movement of life. Mud of swamps embodies birth and death, as it blends creation and deconstruction into one matter by being both fertile filled with hidden eggs but also full of organic waste.
“ Dancers are creatures of earth who respect the power of gravity”
Martha Graham technique
Choreographing my own swamp with water and soil, I use ‘my cupped hands’ in order to shape the creatures of my ecosystem. In Martha Graham technique, the ‘cupped hand’ is the stylized position of the hand being in contraction. It is the gesture of picking soil from the ground. The forms are made out of mud and are placed in a metal sheet container filled with water. They gradually decompose, transform into new, unpredictable shapes and create new relations, reshaping inhabitation in my ‘artificial ‘ swamp.
‘ The cupped hand or contraction hand is a reflection of the torso
’
The Waves , 2020-2022
“ The Waves ” by Virginia Woolf introduces six characters who are grappling with the death of a beloved friend. Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing them through their thoughts and interior soliloquies.
Emotionally identifying with Rhonda, one of the six heroes, and her fragile world, I appropriate her thoughts, insecurities and concerns, and give a spatial existance through sculptures and drawings, to the commons we share.
Rhonda is presented as particularly sensitive, shy, introverted, and socially awkward being lost in her thoughts. Wanting to keep her world hidden, I draw creatures of her imagination, which I map to the Latin alphabet, creating the Waves font.
Excerpts from Rhoda’s thoughts, encoded, sneak into the fragile but at the same time durable wax paper sculptures, which as snake shirts declare her presence through absence.
Occupants , 2016
Has sleep been affected by the endless path of round the clock consumption and production of society? ’
“24/7
Late Capitalism and the end of sleep”, Jonathan Crary
The “Occupants” series is based on my personal experience with insomnia and is visuaIly animated in sculptures and videos with a light, humorous touch. Through my practice I explore the inbetween state of being half asleep and articulate things at the edge of my conscious knowledge. By using shifts in scale, form and materiality the work gives spatial existence to this “grey zone”.
The installation is placed in a dark room, with the only light that of the video projection. Playing with the time it takes the human eye to get used to the darkness, the viewer gradually discovers the massive black “creature” that inhabits the space. The figure-black creature ratio relationship of the projection is in absolute correspondence with the relationship viewer - sculpture tenant of the space.
https://vimeo.com/250123983
