Inside My Athens Studio: A Textile Artist’s Practice

My studio is where the different parts of my practice meet.

It is where textiles can sit beside steel, where drawings can become the beginning of a sculpture and where materials that seem completely different from one another start to find a connection.

Having a studio in Athens has also brought me closer to materials, memories and images that have been present in my practice for a long time. Greece is not just the geographical background to my work but it is part of the visual and cultural landscape that I return to through textiles, domestic objects, family memories and stories passed between generations.

When I work, I often move between making and thinking. A piece of textile might lead to a drawing, a drawing might suggest a structure, a material might bring an entirely different idea and research with it.

Not everything begins with a clear image of what the finished work will be. Sometimes the material has to be handled and felt first. Stitched, stretched, folded, marked or transformed. Through this process, the work gradually reveals what it wants to become.

My studio is therefore both a workspace and a place of deep artistic and material research.

There are textiles, threads, drawings and fragments of materials around me. Some belong to works that are finished and others are waiting to become something else. I often keep things because I am not yet sure what they are going to become.

A textile, especially a reclaimed textile piece, already carries traces of another time. A semedaki, a piece of lace, a knitted surface or a familiar domestic fabric contains its own hidden stories and associations before I even begin working with it. I am interested in what happens when these familiar materials are removed from their original context and placed into a new one.

This is where my practice begins to move between the personal and the collective.

The textile can hold memory, but it can also become something unfamiliar. It can become sculpture, drawing, structure or installation.

In the studio, I am constantly moving between these states.

Some days are slow and methodical. Stitching, counting, repeating a movement. Other days are more physical, particularly when I am working with steel or concrete.

I think this contrast has become an important part of my practice: the patience and delicacy of the thread alongside the weight of the sculpture, the softness of fabric against the permanence of concrete and the way steel is permanent but rusts, something inherited becoming something new.