"Whispers in my Hands" @Athens Art Gallery, Athens, Greece
Dimitra Skandali: Whispers in My Hands
curated by Kostas Prapoglou
‘How does nature speak to me?
The earth I stand on?
What does the sea say to me?
The one close to me, the friendly sea.
What do oceans say to me,
Those far away, the wild ones?’
The visual vocabulary of Dimitra Skandali drifts between the real and the ethereal. Her solo exhibition at the Athens Art Gallery features recent and new works that recontextualise the sense of size and space. Resisting confinement to a single medium or material, she engages with a diverse range of dried flowers, herbs and other plant parts, prickly pear leaves as well as paper, plastic, fabric, wood, acrylic glass, pebbles, marble, shards of rock, ink, seaweed and copper. They all synthesise a glorious symphony of senses and emotions.
Voicing her origins from the Greek island of Paros and her travels all over the world, Skandali propels our attention to those components of nature that played such a pivotal role in her life and the way she deciphers the meaning of her existence. The sea, the salt, the sea breeze, the rocks, the light, the wild plants, are all elements that accompany her since her childhood and through her adult life unconditionally, defining who she is and what she is made of. The earth and the sun and all in between create those circumstances, which make everything interconnected and interrelated.
Traversing across lyrical landscapes, Skandali’s works emerge as eruptions of quaint optical attractiveness, energised by the perpetual need to seek for our roots and better understand the place we live in and belong to. Each work conceals a map, not necessarily a real, physical map, but a noetic construct. During her research, the artist receives inspiration from actual geographical, geological, geophysical, archaeological, nautical and even town maps, which she studies in the same manner as she reads a poem. She gradually begins to meticulously scrutinise and eventually deconstruct them, line by line, verse by verse, looking for symbols and veiled meanings; they float as isolated single entities that fabricate a universal composition. For her, these are the same elements that she also discovers in nature; for example, a little stone or a fragment of marble can both be vital parts of a personal map, segments of her own truth. Some of her works are presented on acrylic glass pronouncing the properties of light and transparency.
Skandali occasionally diverts our gaze towards unexpected and peculiar materials that she embeds in her works such as waste and debris; from pieces of plastic to fragments of abandoned fishing boats and coppered organic forms. They are masterfully interweaved with seaweed sourced from the Greek sea or from distant oceans. The weaving methods that she employs do not only reference bygone eras of traditional craft practices, but they also allude to ideas involving symbiosis and global continuity.
The series of her coppered objects reflects the need to maintain imprints from nature, it is an attempt to make them last a bit longer. Marrying vegetal specimens found in the rocky grounds of the island with material extracted from human waste, the artist brings to life new entities, fossilised versions of memory, identity and beauty.
Juxtaposing the qualities of our natural environment against the human waste on the planet, Skandali manifests –through the prism of an eternal romantic that she is– a space for dreaming and contemplation, despite all the disparities and cacophonies that we continuously come to terms with in our daily life.
Whispers in My Hands is a visual feast initiated by Skandali’s inner compass with the density and the appearance of all mediums, conveying an emotional as well as social connection that expands beyond their objective presence. The landscape that unfolds before our eyes at the gallery space assembles a personal world. It is a cosmos that she generously opens and shares with us, rewarding us with enthralling images, smells and colours, playfully challenging our senses and heightening the experience of our conscious self.