“This weekend is your last chance to vist BIG DEAL No7 an amalgamation of imaginary ideas and processes related and created as a response to the genre of Science Fiction, this exhibition features; sculpture, photography, painting, film, video and audio installations by some 100 international artists and guest students from RCA.”
Every movement, and every gesture, every drop of paint, and every flicker of light were processed in the acute sense of awareness, that after Winnicott I call apperception, and I hope that this will bring a response in my viewer: experience of the roundness of the ping pong balls pyramid perpetually collapsing, (Anything Can Happen Behind The Close Doors, 2014) that reveals a mutability of balance; the fish coming for a breath of air (Fish, 2015) tells a story of serendipity in life; Transformations (2014), and Emergence (2015) are tales of the encounter with circumstances that are beyond one’s control.
Visiting beautiful Greece always invokes the stories of antiquity full of magic and transformation. Connecting present moments with the past, or the past experience with the present moment is often a part of my work. That is why I found the settings of the Old Can Factory in beautiful Prespes so inspiring.
Immediately upon entering the abandoned factory with floors littered by a thick layer of animal droppings, the fifth labour of Hercules came to mind. The almost monochromes environment of death and decay seemed to be calling for purification and the colour of life.
Coincidentally, my current video work, which I was hoping to advance in the waters of Prespes’s lakes, was related to the concept of purification and revival.
This serendipitous coincidence brought forward the work that I called Hercules’s Fifth Labour or Purification by Colour. The work consists of two large paintings on the surfaces of abandoned production line machinery of the Can Factory, and the metaphoric river of colour, placed in the old conveyor valley reminiscent of the river that Hercules used to help him to clean up King Augeas’ stables in a single day.
Taking part in the Camden Image Gallery Exhibition
I have selected a decades old self-portrait superimposed on the old framed picture as a figurative portrait of Time. Here, a fragile paper and its shadow over the glass and the old wooden frame are as much a part of the story as the strokes of pastel merging into the image of the human form.