My work moves between painting, sculpture, installation and performance, exploring freedom, care and the fragile balance of the world that sustains us. In my latest work, these concerns gather around the circle. The Earth and its moon; the sun, the eclipse; a drop of water; the letter O. One form, returned to again and again, because the circle is at once the most modest shape and a way of holding the immense: Kandinsky’s spiritual and cosmic form, NASA’s blue disc hanging in darkness, the yin and yang held in balance. It is the shape of what holds us, and of what we stand to lose.
The works grow from handwritten notes I keep returning to: Sylvia Earle’s warning that without the blue there is no green; Laudato Si’ asking us to care for our common home; poets who treat words as living matter. So my circles carry words. The paintings speak in the Earth’s voice, part plea and part command: Remember me. Stand free. Inspire. Care. In one canvas, the word YOU opens in the middle, and the O swells into the planet itself. Within the word that addresses us, the Earth is already present.
The materials do the same work as the words. Ultramarine, literally “beyond the sea”, becomes ocean and outer space at once; gold leaf becomes corona, halo and rain. Grounds thick with fabric, feathers, gypsum, wood chips and glass gathered on the shore of Leros crack, gather and settle into their own geography, the way earth does. Balance is everywhere provisional: an eclipse is only two circles agreeing, for a breath, to align.
This attention to matter runs through my practice. My background in chemistry taught me to observe the physical properties of materials: how they resist, fracture, soften or transform. A stone can be hard and still be fragile; a rope can be soft and yet carry extraordinary tension. These contradictions draw me in. Through haptic perception, I explore how texture, weight and resistance can make sensory experience an instrument of knowledge, how a surface can be felt through looking, and how that feeling can change what we understand.
My Greek roots, the process artists of the 1960s and the years I spent living and working in New York continue to inform this approach. Motherhood brought another understanding of care into my work. In the series Pumping Bags (2022–2024), I explored the physical and symbolic experience of nurturing life, and the relationship between the maternal body and Mother Nature. That concern now extends towards the Earth: the body that holds us all.
Freedom has always been my subject. In this work, it turns towards the planet: to let it stand free of what we impose upon it, and to recognise ourselves as part of its life. To remember, to name, to inspire: each becomes a form of care. These paintings are my own circular letter, sent to whoever finds them: one circle, held whole a while longer.
I paint to give voice to something that has no mouth, and to leave whoever encounters it the last word.
