Velvet Gardens Festival 2025/ Moms
It was a joy to participate in this year’s Velvet Gardens Festival, themed MoMs. Curated by The Callas and Nadja Argyropoulou, it was a beautiful gathering and exhibition, in the company of amazing artists and visitors.
This year’s festival was dedicated to Aris and Lakis’s mother, who passed away earlier in the year, giving the event a deeply moving resonance. It was powerful to see all the artists sharing their experiences of the maternal.
I exhibited two works:
The Madonna of the Mushroom Fields, 2025, Oil on linen, 45 × 35 cm
Nursing Madonna of the Penises, 2025, 20 × 18 × 20 cm
Both works play with representations of the Madonna — the Holy Mother, the Big Mother. Transformation is central to my practice in two ways: as a process, through my interaction with materials, and in the reshaping of inherited images. Drawing from classical works, popular culture, and natural forms, I deconstruct these images or turn their conventions on their head, discovering new, unexpected representations in the process. These emerge as joint creations of my body and my materials. The material itself embodies the maternal — these two words sharing a root in the Latin mater. Mother is also land; she is the ground from which we all emerge, and I want to pay respect to all people who have lost their land, are expelled from it, or fight for it.
My works were installed outside, inviting a dialogue not only between themselves but also with the surrounding landscape.
