MARIA KOTSOU, "We are what our hands make"

Have you seen how photographic film appears in a darkroom? The picture emerges gradually. The works of Maria Kotsou create exactly this impression. In the Tapestry group exhibition, which was presented last summer at Pyrgos Bazaios in Naxos, Maria participated with three large tapestries. Two of them depicted her two grandmothers, both weavers. Photographic prints on paper, cut into strips, were woven together with cotton threads on a traditional horizontal loom. "I was studying at the 1st Painting Workshop at ASKT in Athens, I was experimenting with video and painting. During Erasmus in Poland, a country with a great tradition in weaving, I visited a workshop where they worked with threads. Fabrics, embroideries, textiles everywhere.

Surrounded by looms, I thought I was back in Naxos with my grandmothers. I went back and incorporated the threads into my projects. That's how my relationship with beds began." Photography, he argues, like weaving, is a medium that allows you to bring the past into the present, but also to travel through the process of memory.

"What is it that connects modern media with traditional arts? Where does photography meet weaving? For me it is the recording of time. To make a fabric, you have to add many horizontal lines, one such line is photographic film.' He stayed in Athens for ten years and now lives permanently in Apeiranthos. "At first I had doubts, I didn't know if I had made the right decision, I was leaving Athens and going to isolate myself in a small settlement. And if I go back to the source and cheat? If my associating with nerds is holding me back creatively?

Now I know that even the stories I will hear from the women of the village inspire me. We are what we do, what our hands make, we are our roots."

→ @mariakotsou_

ANGELIKI DIMITRIADOU, "The loom is not just a tool"

I have never seen Angeliki Dimitriadou. I don't know how her face lights up or the tone of her voice when she talks about her art. If she expresses herself with intensity or if she stands aloof from her work when it is completed. At the time we did the interview, he was away on a business trip to Europe and our conversation was in writing.

This "sterile" communication, which does not allow you to distinguish intentions and subtle nuances in the emotion that moves the hand, was compensated to a certain extent by her Instagram account. Particularly active on social media, she offers you access to her workshop and work process.

She is self-taught and her relationship with weaving is a relationship of memory, combined with the summers of her childhood and the "loom", as she and her sister called the space where her grandmother had set up the loom. There were still cotton warps on it and the girls imitated the repetitive motions of the weavers. She first started weaving – then painting – building a loom herself, but quickly switched to the Japanese Saori loom.

"This particular loom was made out of a need and a concept – I'm fascinated by the fact that there's something behind it all, that it's not just a tool." He states that he creates woven fabrics spontaneously, without following a specific technique, guided only by the threads, which he chooses very carefully. Her canvas balances abstract painting with weaving. "The relationship between them is two-way. One creates space for the other.

I work with both at the same time, but often one prevails and guides the composition." Is there a difference in the way she thinks when she paints and when she weaves? "I have never thought about it and I think the answer is yes, there is. In the weaving in the subconscious the memory of the primordial and nature through the contact with the handmade natural threads, while the painting process always gives me the feeling of the new".

→ aggelikidimitriadou.com, @aggelikidimitriadou

ELIODORA MARGELLOU, "Thread has a huge tolerance for error"

At the recent Los Angeles Frieze, the works of Heliodora Margellou were presented together with those of Paolo Colombo. This time the Greek artist had chosen to embroider her abstract works on metal screens.

"This material is reminiscent of traditional canvas, but it is transparent and so, when hung on a wall, it creates a play with shadows that I am very interested in." She adds that she also liked the idea of ​​playing between contrasting textures and concepts – the soft and warm yarn and the hard, cold metal. She was accepted to Yale to study medicine. Her original intention was to pursue two directions at once: medicine and art.

But when he found that this was practically impossible, he chose art. Thread, like fabric, was present in her practice from the beginning, but in recent years she has been dealing with it systematically. "The first introduction was made by my grandmothers. I grew up in Geneva and, when I came to Greece in the summers, I would sit next to them and watch them, one knitting and the other embroidering.

Thread has a huge tolerance for error. You can rip, cut, fix. It's a forgiving material that allows you to change your mind as the project progresses. Waiting, her first work with embroidery, was completed after she gave birth to her daughter, but she had prepared the design and threads while she was pregnant.

"The works are still quite abstract today. The choices of colors and textures determine the feeling I want to communicate." She mentions that embroidery also offers her flexibility in moving around. "You can create anywhere, all spaces can function as a laboratory. I even embroider in the car, waiting for my little daughter to finish gymnastics."

→ The next exhibition of Iliodora Margellou will be hosted at the Two Villages Gallery, from 04/06 to 05/06. iliodoramargellos.com

ALEXANDRA KEHAGIOGLOU, "There is something therapeutic in the process"

The Greek public got to know the distinguished artist Alexandra Kehagioglou in 2016, when she signed the windows of Hermès in Athens. She had introduced herself to the international scene with her impressive carpets.

In the case of Hermès, however, her fabrics functioned as linings for saddles and bags, showing the inexhaustible applications of this creative expression. Alexandra's relationship with weaving and tapestry is inextricably linked with her family's history. Her grandmother's family, Elpiniki from Isparta in Asia Minor, had a long tradition in carpet making.

With the Catastrophe of 1922, the family arrived in Athens and within a short period of time they decided to send the 13-year-old Elpiniki to Argentina, to meet her future husband. "Think how brutal that was, a little girl got on a ship, stayed in the ocean for three months and made a new start in an unknown land, with an unknown man."

She soon rebuilt her loom and began making carpets, which she traded. All four of her children joined the business, they all knew how to calibrate looms, were involved with wefts and warps. Alexandra grew up in this environment, she was accepted to the School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, but she initially researched other expressive tools.

"The thread has always been there, but you are hesitant to follow a tradition that "runs" in your family. You want to have the freedom of choice, of conscious decision." The woolen thread, he points out, stays with time, changes with it, wears out, but endures. She mainly works with the tufting (pistol) technique, however she always wanted to learn traditional loom.

“My father, while he was well, shared information with me, but he soon became seriously ill. I left it in the middle then, emotionally it was impossible for me. But it never left my mind and so now, in the workshop I have set up in Athens, there is a large monastic loom. I started lessons with a nun in a monastery in Crete and still continue with a teacher. There is something therapeutic in the process, in the repetition of movement. It is not a matter of technique or the pursuit of perfection. The point is to tell a story. And error has a place in things."

→ Garden Futures: Designing with Nature, Vitra Design Museum, from 25/03 to 03/10. alexandrakehayoglou.com

TATIANA MAY – KALLERGI, "I like the dance of the thread when it passes through the fabric"

Divided between tufting and embroidery, Tatiana May-Kallergi would like to explore all the possibilities of thread. "Lately, I've also been interested in the digital loom," she tells me, as she embroiders lobsters and poppies on napkins and tablecloths for the Greek design brand Locul.

Her practice was based on painting and the idea of ​​thread was born when she was looking for ways to transcribe paintings on a larger scale. She learned to embroider from her mother, but experimented quite a bit. "Embroidery has rules, but you can also ignore them and move freely.

A fabric and a thread can lead you creatively in ways you didn't imagine." In her works she elaborates the power of symbols, "marrying" on the same surface some easily recognizable ones with others less familiar ones. "So stories are created that are more open to interpretation."

She considers the "pistol" as a medium to be more playful, while embroidery makes a dialogue with the history of weaving, and has a more visual direction. For her works she draws inspiration from different sources. From Monet, from traditional patterns on Afghan carpets, from graffiti on the streets of Athens, even from sculptures using artificial intelligence. "I prefer the thread, I like that dance when it goes through the fabric. It is a "cleaner" and more powerful tool. You pass the oil over and over again to show, the thread immediately leaves its mark."

→ tatianamay.com, @tatianamay_

ZOI GAITANIDOU, "Another energy comes out of the thread"

Zoe Gaitanidou was still a student at the School of Fine Arts in Athens, when she attempted to mend a pair of trousers for practical reasons. The patch seemed interesting to her and it was what prompted her to put aside the brushes and "tangle" with the threads.

In her graduation she presented dolls sewn by herself in natural (human) size, on which she had embroidered with "free" stitches "diaries of everyday life". It was preceded by a long trip to Nepal and so he used the textile bodies to capture on them routes, landscapes, villages and people he met.

"I liked the idea of ​​working an object in stages, I was fascinated by that sense of thread that never ends...". Completing her studies, she decided to follow the same logic on canvas. "The thread is a more "living" material, another energy comes out on the canvas, it sucks you in, you want to get close, touch it." The subject of the Amazon, Africa, the communities that live there and their art, interests her and feeds her pictorially, however the management of the material has changed.

"Now I save on sewing. The thread has more power when used in moderation, when combined with pastels, acrylics." I ask her if she would like to learn to loom or learn to embroider. "Neither; when you go to perfect a knowledge, you will lose something. You will grant this freedom that experimentation offers you, this wild joy that gives you the exploration of materials and their limits".

→ Zoe Gaitanidou is represented by The Breeder gallery. Her next exhibition will be hosted there in the spring. @zoigaitanidou

* Thanks to High Noon architecture studio for providing their space.

Source: https://www.kathimerini.gr/k/k-magazine/562266328/exi-ellinides-fiber-artists-poy-dimioyrgoyn-techni-me-klosti-kai-nima/

Sending humanitarian aid from Greece to Turkey for the victims of the deadly earthquake "Greek Women of the World" at the Archaeological Museum of Patras on March 28, 2023