Exhibition Testimony #2: Fragments of a Landscape
I had stopped seeing triple long ago. The world was now spinning so violently around my eyes that I was seeing hundreds of malevolent copies of everything. Each step I took felt like it was being swallowed by the ground. Nowhere felt like a safe and solid surface to put the trust of my footfall in. Midnight Rambler by The Rolling Stones blared at a cacophonous volume in my ears, the live version from 1973 at the Forest National Arena in Brussels of course!
A dumb casualty of the night, I stumbled around aimlessly. An easy target if there ever was one. I found myself under the cover of a large atrium, with ribs of steel connected by membranous panes of glass. I’ve never seen this place in my life. Through the melting haze of my vision, I squinted at a horizontal blue sign with some words screaming off of it;
WATERWATERERERLOOLOOLOO UNDERGRUNDERGRUOUNDND
STASTASTATISTATITION
Wrong! I have, in fact, been to Waterloo Station. But what on Earth am I doing here? This isn’t even on my way home. I could barely recall my own name and if someone asked me what year it was, I’d probably be a decade off.
It was taking all my strength and composure to stop myself from dropping to the ground and letting strange visions wash me helplessly out to the open and unfathomable waters of my subconscious. Nothing about this was what one would consider normal; and under the cover of this abnormality, my peripheral vision was being caressed by waves of black and white. Or was it some kind of monochrome wind? I’m still undecided. What I knew for sure was that some inky blackness peppered by glowing white lines was encroaching from all corners of my vision. These velvety storm clouds had to be kept at bay, lest I totally lose my way.
I was perfectly fine just under an hour ago. But I knew exactly why this was happening, and perhaps you should too.
January 9th, 2025. 18:34.
I was on my way to a private view at WIP Space in Wandsworth. It was the opening night of Eleni Maragaki’s solo show, and as I had befriended her while writing about her work in the Hari Art Prize of 2024, she extended a cordial invitation. On a forgetful little street, abutted by the back of an antenna warehouse, which leads to some van parking and the entrance to an MOT test centre, the studio space stands out conspicuously. But when it’s a quaint little Georgian building with spectacular brickwork we’re talking about, the relative anonymity of its surroundings emphasises rather than causes its splendour.
Bright and warm light spilt out of large windows into the freezing night, the illuminated squares on the pavement instantly frosting over. Throwing two Snickers wrappers – the remains of my dinner that evening – into the bin by the door, I went inside.
Fragments of a Landscape is a fitting name for this show; the artworks, though numerous, are small-to-medium in size. But within the show’s context, they work wonderfully. Like shards of some fantastical looking-glass, the pieces act as doorways into sombre vistas that unfurl around you as if out of the pages of some ancient story. Apart from a single work, the rest of the show is in monochrome - white lines etched gracefully into deep blacks. I say etched despite there being only one piece in the show that involved any wood carving. Thunderous applause is needed for the sculptural manner in which Eleni has rendered patterns and texture on a flat surface.
Just like the beauty of Nature she’s celebrating, her compositions are incredibly simple on the surface… until a layer of blissful complexity reveals itself. Stare at clouds for long enough, and you’ll notice fractal-like patterns along their edges. A close inspection of any leaf will lay bare its complicated cellular arrangement. Look at the structure of a honeycomb. Or, I don’t know, slice an onion in half. Geometric harmony is everywhere in Nature, in some places quite subtle (like the carpels in the middle of flowers) while obviously divine in others (like a Romanesco broccoli). In much the same way, once the eyes apprehend the outline of a mountain or some trees or a wave in Eleni’s work, the interplay of her linework begins to take on a life of its own, dancing in elaborate formation. It’s believed that some people dream in colour, while some dream in black and white. I imagine Eleni’s works mimic what monochrome dreams look like.
There were a handful of people in the gallery, chatting to each other and milling around the artworks. A toddler was strapped to their father’s chest in a harness, letting out soft coughs and staring at the artwork with innocent incredulity. How did these artworks look like through this tiny human’s perception, I wondered. Could they grasp the elaboration of Eleni’s artistic and personal sensibilities? The toddler looked at me blankly. I gave them a nod of recognition.
It was at this point that Eleni appeared from a side room. Her soft-spoken lilt was floating out of there earlier as she chatted away with visitors. But now she was standing right behind me in a black turtleneck of soft velvet and flowing green trousers, her hair neatly tied back.
After swapping some pleasantries and well-wishes, she quickly had to run and greet some more people. It was, after all, her night.
“This is my partner Oli by the way,” she said, beckoning a bright-faced young man with translucent rectangular glasses and a prickly stubble to my side. We spoke at length about his work in art therapy before I realised I had been here for over fifteen minutes without having a single drink.
“Shall we?” I asked him as I began moving towards the front room where formerly empty-handed people were emerging with drinks in their hands. Eleni suddenly materialised by our side, however, and said to Oli, “I want you to meet some of my friends,” then apologised for whisking him away. Ah well, I guess I’ll have to socialise without the cover of company.
On a large and sturdy wooden table sat a bucket wide enough to hold an adult in the foetal position. Instead, and more appealingly, it held soft drinks and white wine resting on icy bedrock. A regiment of red wine bottles stood guard next to the bucket. I poured myself a glass of red, trying to match the amount in everyone else’s glass. Proud cheapskate though I am, I have enough social graces not to flaunt it.
I then got locked into a lengthy conversation with an artist and fellow resident of the studio, Birgitte Aasen. She had turned up straight from work in her paint-splattered blue overalls. Our chat gymnastically jumped through topics such as the pedigree of private view wine, having easily misspelt names, the generational gap, what differentiates work and a career, whether death legitimises one’s work, etc. All the while, I liberally refilled our wine glasses.
Although I never used to be, I’ve been very responsible with my alcohol and narcotic intake lately. Learning my own limits and when I should stop. It’s a very different matter, however, when the poison is free. We all love free stuff, is that such a crime? Those were the words that kept my voice of reason on a tight leash as I knocked back one glass of red wine after another.
People began migrating outside for a smoke, so I followed suit because I needed fresh air – or as fresh as air one can get surrounded by smokers. Not before refilling my drink again. Out in the biting cold where every exhale of smoke billowed like the exhaust of a steam engine, I met Birgitte’s husband, Nathan, and another artist by the name of Briony Marshall. Because I hate carrying my own bags on me, I had been clutching Ten Thousand Apologies - the current book I’m reading - all evening with the fervour of a priest warding off evil spirits. Written by Adele Stripe and frontman of Fat White Family, Lias Saoudi, the book chronicles the band’s anarchical history, a castle built then crumbled under extreme hedonism and acts of questionable iconoclasm. That was but the briefest summary of the ramble I launched into once Nathan asked me what I was reading.
Once we filtered back inside, I found Eleni unaccompanied in the gallery so I sidled over to her side with a head full of questions.
“Soooooo, what’s with the nocturnal look in this show? Was that a conscious decision?”
She looked at me brightly and then said, “This nocturnal look is something I recently begun exploring. In the past, I was more focused on depicting clouds, which often directed my attention to the daytime or transitional times like sunrise or sunset. In this particular time of day, the light behaves in subtle and transformative ways. It doesn’t dominate the scene but becomes fragmented into small marks, which reminds me of the linocut technique.”
“Because this is so evocative of the night for me, the bright lines carved into the velvety black. It’s giving me medieval wood carving. Kinda like the murals on the Northern Line platform at Charing Cross,” I blabbered. “Could you tell me more about your technique?”
“My practice currently moves between drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Rather than seeing these as separate areas, I’m interested in the relationships and dialogues between them. For example, I approach printmaking not just as a way to create images but as an extension of sculpture (a sculptural process flattened onto a 2D surface). This perspective allows me to explore textures, patterns, and dimensionality in a multifaceted and layered approach,” she said with as much lucidity as I was lacking.
“Yeah,” I reflected, “I know you for your sculptural stuff, so I was surprised to find so many prints around here. Except this…” I pointed at a rotating mechanism on a table. “Could you tell me more about this?”
It was a rotating cylindrical pillar with waves patterned all over it in the same vivid monochrome style as the rest of the show. Black rings, balanced obliquely one atop the other, surrounded this pillar. Hooked up to a simple motor, the rotation gives the rings the impression of floating around this pillar as if by some magnetic levitation. She called it Circular Waterfall.
“This piece,” she said, moving closer to it so we both loomed over it, mesmerised by its perambulation, “reflects my interest in how mechanical motion can symbolically intersect with the natural world. The rotating rings represent mechanical or human-made elements, which are juxtaposed with the landscape printed in the middle. I’m intrigued by how these two worlds coexist, overlap, or sometimes contradict each other. The mechanical motion appears to mimic or respond to the rhythms of nature, creating a dialogue between the constructed and the organic.”
Staring at this superconductor that drew power from the natural and mechanic, my tipsy mind began to wander towards the fundamental interconnectivity between all things. There seems to be somewhat of an insistence on differentiating between the natural and the manufactured. The natural denotes parks, green fields, blue skies, and anything organic that came from the Earth of the climate. Meanwhile, anything manufactured denotes its origins from an assembly line or a sweatshop. The human-made stuff we find littering the natural world. The detritus of modern civilisation. However, I don’t believe there’s a rigid boundary separating the natural and manufactured. The stuff we use to manufacture can trace its ancestry back to the raw materials that were once upon a time extracted from nature. Even synthetic, lab-grown materials pay homage to those raw materials. So in a sense, even the artificial is natural; even if some nature is better than others.
When I look at this spinning conduit, I imagine harmony between the natural and human-made, an alternative to the baleful and beastial way the artificial interacts with the natural.
“And what’s this?” I asked while pointing to the object next to the spinning sculpture. With small circles - each depicting a tiny fraction of a scene - stuck to a zig-zagging spine curving in on itself, it looked like a pop-out book folded inside out. Of course, the miniature scenes were also rendered in her dramatic style.
“The Deconstructed Landscape is a type of book called a ‘flag book’,” she told me. “It is made from linocut prints that I would normally throw away but instead I decided to transform them into a book. In a similar way to the rest of my work, it represents the intersection of the landscape with geometry as a symbol of the meeting points between humanmade elements and the natural landscape. The structure of the flag book, with its overlapping and foldable parts, mirrors that intersection.”
“And what’s up with this?” I was referring to a piece of what looked like A2 paper stuck to the wall above the table where the two sculptures sat. Drawn in a neat and wonderful hand with immaculate red and blue shading are these impossible shapes that defy Euclidian geometry. Rings, spirals, and polygons loop and twist onto themselves as if self-devouring. I can only describe these collections of diagrams as the blueprints for some incomprehensible concepts. They seem to boldly venture so far into the realm of theoretical physics that they appear familiar yet totally alien.
“The visualisation of the theoretical research is of equal importance with the practical aspect of my art,” Eleni said politely. “My process involves continuous tests, trials and errors through the creation of these large-scale drawings, which I consider part of the final work. I often begin projects with these drawings as they allow me to try out ideas in an abstract and exploratory way without worrying about form or outcome. These drawings explore the ideas of rotational movement and helical symmetry, as part of the design of my upcoming kinetic project.”
Indeed, I could see the form and design of Circular Waterfall sketched out in this diagram, making me wonder whether that sculpture is a precursor to something upcoming…
I could tell that some people were itching for Eleni’s company, so I thanked her for now and continued looking around the exhibition. But not before refilling my drink. The miniature size of the wine glasses and the capacious volume of my mouth made it very easy to knock the wine back in a couple of gulps, and pretty soon I lost count of how many I had.
On a table is what some would argue is the centrepiece of the show; a puzzle with hand-carved wooden pieces. The image completed by the puzzle is of a hilly vista overlooking its reflection upon a peaceful body of water, the clouds in the sky and the waves on the water mirroring each other. The puzzle is a 1:1 reproduction of a print on a wall beside the table. Someone’s finished the puzzle. Good for them, I thought with the jealousy of someone who’s trumped by the simplest jigsaws. For my own satisfaction, and to allow others to finish it again, I began jumbling the puzzle up. The black wooden pieces with their white carved lines were the perfect flavour of coarse in my fingers as I moved them out of place, putting a wave in the sky, a cloud in the water, and dispersing bits of the mountain across both. It looked gloriously messy.
Later on, I found the puzzle completed again…
On another wall, I came across something brilliant. A vortex was breaking forth across a circular plain. Concentric rings radiated outwards over the image of violent waves, each circle moving its part of the image slightly out of place until the whole thing resembled a trippy glitch. This graphical hallucination is heightened by shades of red and cyan repelling each other so that the thing can be experienced properly through a pair of red-cyan 3D glasses. Once I took the glasses from the shelf and wore them, the waves began crashing upon the adjacent circle. Unable to flow smoothly through these desynchronised waters, the waves broke and spilt into the next circle which, in turn, spilt into the next. This messy cascade of foam was already quite dramatic without the glasses, so the added depth was appreciated.
The rest of the pieces in the show were small prints showing Nature in her many moods: billowing clouds running away, infinite skies, placid trees, boundless forests. As I was looking at these, I was gripped by one more question for Eleni.
I found her chatting with Oli and once I found an opening in the conversation, I said, “I see there’s a strong emphasis on waves, mountain and hill ranges, and trees. What about these aspects of nature speak to you?”
There was a gleam in her eye when she said, “These elements of nature embody a correlation between organic forms and geometric patterns. Nature is complex and chaotic, yet it operates with a sense of order and structure. For example, waves are fluid and ever-changing, but they follow rhythmic patterns. I view geometry as a hidden order, an underlying grid that establishes the way in which the elements of our world confront one another. I am interested in exploring it not as human fabrication but as human observation.”
“So how much of that comes from your native Greek landscape?”
“The landscapes of Greece,” she said sweetly, “are a primary source of inspiration for me. I don’t rely on photographs or drawings but instead, I create these landscapes from memory and imagination. This approach is related to my early childhood experiences travelling with my family around Greece, especially the Peloponnese. I believe that the uniqueness of the Greek landscape lies in its diversity. There is a combination of seascapes, mountains, forests, and a wide variety of other landscapes all within the same country. This multiplicity allows me to continue exploring it to this day and be surprised by it.”
Embedded into her memories and engraved into her bones are the vistas of her homeland, which she’s shared with us so generously in this show. It ends on the 23rd of January (my lateness in writing this piece hasn’t left you much time), so go catch it if you find the time.
My memory from this point onwards resembles tissue paper being eaten by a flame. Amidst this roll of charred holes, the only solid memory I have left is wandering into the side room that joined the gallery space. There was a desk with random art-related knick-knacks; a cutting mat, foam corners, scissors, a set of keys, and paint rollers. All around the room were more of Eleni’s prints, except these weren’t framed like the ones in the gallery. What convinced me that I had wandered into her workspace were her pencil sketches taped all over the walls. There were forests, coastlines, and mountains; all in all, landscapes commensurate with her current artistic phase. Instead of the white-on-black of her final works, these black-on-white sketches felt like negatives that would be turned into finished positives.
There was another glitchy circular piece; this time it was a forest broken out of sync by concentric circles, yet the foliage flowed similarly from one ring to the next as the waves in the gallery.
On my way out of this room, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a small print of a dog. Done in Eleni’s hypnotic monochrome, the ponderous creature looked lost in thought, as if trying to figure out whether to leap and pluck the frisbee out of the air or not. I tapped the print in my drunk approximation of petting the dog and made my exit.
I went for one last drink but each bottle I picked up turned out to be empty. My sorry victims. I finally found a bottle that I emptied into my glass, which, in turn, I drained down. I got engaged in a long conversation that I won’t bother reproducing here, after which I said my goodbyes and set off towards the station.
My watch read 9:17 pm. How wonderful, I thought. I have so much of the evening left. I began dreaming of dinner and all the things I’d do with so much time ahead of me. Regrettably, none of my hopes came to fruition. Large parts of my memory are blotted out like an inkwell spilt over an important document. I have no recollection of ever reaching the station. Clearly it was during the walk to the station that all the wine I had consumed hit my liver like a train.
This is where I find myself at Waterloo Station, nowhere next to my way back home, with visions of voluptuous monochrome flooding my eyes. Unable to hold them off any longer, I was dropped into one of Eleni’s artworks. A barren and rocky mountain lay sprawling at my feet, clouds exploding above, and the horizon stretching all around me. Deathly afraid of heights and not wanting to try my luck up here, I began my descent with a few tentative steps until I saw something unlikely off to my right; an escalator. Hewn straight into the side of this mountain, I preferred this method of descent to tempting gravity with my shaky step. On my smooth way down, I saw the vista transform into a subterranean cavern as if the mountain was turned inside out like a used sock. At the foot of the escalator was a network of caves and tunnels, hot air blowing out of them and right in my face. I followed my nose down one of these and ended up at a train platform. The train that arrived a couple of minutes later looked like the tube, except the reds and blues were swallowed up by the void. Not a soul was on the carriage with me, which was all for the best because I was barely keeping it together. Pretty soon, I was on the other side, bourne up a set of escalators that spat me out into the open air. As fresh air filled my lungs, the black-and-white visions subsided and colour was restored to the world, like condensation disappearing from glass. I stumbled up the stairs (at first the wrong ones for I tried to gain entry into the building next to mine), screamed some garbled greeting at my flatmate, and passed out.
Three things greeted me next morning. A drilling headache along with a churning hunger.
The second was the realisation I had lost my book at some point last night during my travel back home. I definitely remember leaving the gallery with it, but where it ended up, god knows. Probably on the tube. It didn’t even belong to me, but to my friend who couldn’t stop talking about this book, gave me her copy once she was done and implored me to read it. Ridden with guilt, I instantly ordered another copy and resolved to avoid my friend until it arrived. She’s bound to read this and figure out my treachery. Sorry Eliza… shit happens when I’m not on top.
The third greeting was surprise. How on Earth did I manage to wake up in my bed and not out on the street with a knife wound? What kind of homing pigeon instinct led me home? Or was it the effect of Eleni’s show that guided me home? White lines flowing through the black haze, lighting the way forward.
I have no profound or resonant statement to end this piece with other than, go watch the show. Perhaps don’t overdo the booze. But even if you do, you’re safe in the knowledge that the ethereal effect of Eleni’s works will keep you steady.
All images courtesy of Eleni. What? You think I can take photographs that well? Get out of here!
