ABOUT PROJECT:
The summer of 2021 I traveled to the island of Milos in Greece on my own. A few weeks before that I felt like I missed my former sense of creation and everything I had done before do not give me the same pleasure anymore. I was going to get married in a month so I especially needed to spend some time alone to feel and be more aware of myself as a woman and as an artist at this point in time. I thought a lot about my lineage, my origins, what came before me and what will come after. I thought about the mother-child bond, about the women in my family, about my childhood memories and experiences.
Milos is one of the first Cycladic islands that became inhabited. Exactly 202 years ago – on April 8, 1820 – Venus de Milo, Aphrodite, muse of many artists and poets, symbol of woman was found on this island. April 8 is also my birthday, which I haven't really liked since I was a teenager, but such connections to what I'm starting to explore always seem to be no coincidence to me.
I've been thinking about women, their power and nature, their shapes, states and embodiments almost all of my adult life. The symbol of Venus has already appeared in my life, but at that moment I wanted to go deeper into it and Milos was the perfect place to go to find answers to my questions about woman and her true nature.
Milos is one of the first Cycladic islands that became inhabited. Exactly 202 years ago – on April 8, 1820 – Venus de Milo, Aphrodite, muse of many artists and poets, symbol of woman was found on this island. April 8 is also my birthday, which I haven't really liked since I was a teenager, but such connections to what I'm starting to explore always seem to be no coincidence to me.
I've been thinking about women, their power and nature, their shapes, states and embodiments almost all of my adult life. The symbol of Venus has already appeared in my life, but at that moment I wanted to go deeper into it and Milos was the perfect place to go to find answers to my questions about woman and her true nature.
It was extremely hot on Milos in July. I lived in a cool Cycladic house made of white stone, which was a real cave with a single window and without any connection. Every morning I woke up around 6 a.m. and walked along dusty roads past the white-washed churches beside the sea to Sarakiniko Beach to be alone there at dawn. That place fascinated me. It simultaneously soothed and stirred at the same time. The mighty elements, the dazzling colors and the unique patterns of cracks that turned into soft lines. The silence seemed deafening there.
The first days I did not take pictures at all, only endlessly looking, walking barefoot on the stones, sometimes getting lost, looking for something that would inspire me to new thoughts in my art, accumulating. On the penultimate day before I left, coming there again early in the morning, I suddenly felt a strong desire to capture this land, every bit of it. It was not the usual collecting, but some kind of passionate and greedy call, a revelation. I wanted to explore, to examine, to touch, and to capture every roughness there. I shot these lines and textures of the earth and suddenly realised clearly that I was seeing a woman in it.
I realised that this earth is a body. The body of a woman. The body that gives life and takes it away. It is the origin, the shelter, our strength and our roots. It is a place that holds our history, that has centuries of memory, that understands our language and our silence. Wherever we find ourselves, the curves of her body are everywhere.
The first days I did not take pictures at all, only endlessly looking, walking barefoot on the stones, sometimes getting lost, looking for something that would inspire me to new thoughts in my art, accumulating. On the penultimate day before I left, coming there again early in the morning, I suddenly felt a strong desire to capture this land, every bit of it. It was not the usual collecting, but some kind of passionate and greedy call, a revelation. I wanted to explore, to examine, to touch, and to capture every roughness there. I shot these lines and textures of the earth and suddenly realised clearly that I was seeing a woman in it.
I realised that this earth is a body. The body of a woman. The body that gives life and takes it away. It is the origin, the shelter, our strength and our roots. It is a place that holds our history, that has centuries of memory, that understands our language and our silence. Wherever we find ourselves, the curves of her body are everywhere.
I remember then just sitting in the shade and breaking into tears. There was such a surge of feelings inside that I didn't even need to analyse, write down, or try to keep up with my thoughts anymore. I felt absolute clarity, as calm and deafening at the same time as the silence at 6 a.m. on Venus Island.
This project is by far the most precious memory and revelation that has happened to me in the last years of my art. It consists of nine diptychs: pictures of the snow-white land of Milos intertwined with pictures of the female body. The curves of the woman's body replicate the curves of the earth.
It is an admiration of woman and nature, a reflection on their inextricable connection, the standards of beauty imposed on us, and a reminder of who we are at the beginning and the end. At some point, gazing into these photographs, the woman suddenly becomes the earth and the earth the woman. There is no shame or pretense in her. She is unique. She is perfect.
*All the pictures of the female body were taken by me before the trip to the island and the pairs were picked up much later without any special reproduction of each other. My earlier works have been put together in a puzzle with later works as (not) coincidentally as everything in this story has coincided.
This project is by far the most precious memory and revelation that has happened to me in the last years of my art. It consists of nine diptychs: pictures of the snow-white land of Milos intertwined with pictures of the female body. The curves of the woman's body replicate the curves of the earth.
It is an admiration of woman and nature, a reflection on their inextricable connection, the standards of beauty imposed on us, and a reminder of who we are at the beginning and the end. At some point, gazing into these photographs, the woman suddenly becomes the earth and the earth the woman. There is no shame or pretense in her. She is unique. She is perfect.
*All the pictures of the female body were taken by me before the trip to the island and the pairs were picked up much later without any special reproduction of each other. My earlier works have been put together in a puzzle with later works as (not) coincidentally as everything in this story has coincided.
