I was born in a world full of contradictions. My father was born in a village at the plateau of central Greece, part of a long line of landowners. My mother has been a skilled weaver and sound singer. They both met when my mother was travelling to the central plateau of Greece for the cotton season. Since the family periodically needed extra hands at times, I was brought up almost as a boy, learning how to dig, weed, weave, and look after animals.
In the 1998 at the age of 18, for the first time I encountered conceptual drawing, with two torsos in charcoal merging as my first responsive piece of work. The only resource that the area I grew up was offering at the time was graphic design where after graduating I moved to Athens to further inform and cultivate the path of a graphic designer, a path that I loved and cherished. After some years of practice, I realized the necessity of an intervention at my professional path. It was the first contact with the distinct natural light on the island of Delos that gave birth to the desire for something deeper, and the answer to the nature of the intervention needed.
In 2020 I decided to return to formal education and in 2023 I graduated with the MA in Digital Arts from the School of Design at Greenwich University. This enriched my perception where forms of art provided the ground for expansion. Currently, I am working with a range of media that include design, experimental video, installations, experimental sound and photography, sculpture, and space interventions.
The nature of my research and practice would be described as organic, responsive to the environment that informs and forms its own life. A synthesis where I tend to create many cores and expand them. My approach can be minimal, or abstract, and at times a little noisy. I am merely interested in how our perceptions formed and act in our world. The nature of the relationships they create and how these form our realities.
In my most recent installation at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery and my piece “wordswordswords. Looking beyond words”, I explored the nature of words and the influence that language has on our perceptions. The Whorfian hypothesis states that the language one speaks changes the way one thinks about reality. This gets us back to the beginning, where it all began, to the moment of language’s first inception. With the inception of an imaginative language that says nothing, and signifies nothing, yet emits quiet connotations of unknown origin, challenging us to question our relationship with language and words and let go of our preconceptions. After all, archaeology reveals the developmental layers of language, but the origin remains a mystery.
In some ways, I insist on ignoring the desire to make sense of the text and instead explore it as a form. This is a strategy that I tend to explore throughout my work. The imaginative language is a process of inquiry and an attempt to reach to a place where I can break through the cycle of meaning. By inwardly pursuing the idea of no meaning and constructing an alternate world, an open universal text that is beyond traditional linguistics as we know it.
Acknowledging the power of exploring and questioning, my aim is to offer through my work an opportunity to experience, re-think, re-define or even reinvent the nature of their relationship with language and words. A journey into different ways of looking at perceptions and an attempt to elicit an insight rather a result.