Smells like yellow
yellow plaster, 120cm height
2016-2017
A reference to The Yellow Wallpaper, the feminist ghost story. In the short story whose female protagonist is confined in a quiet rural house, in a room with a yellow wallpaper. Spending time in the room, deprived of any intellectual stimuli, she starts seeing the yellow entering the room, smelling it, seeing forms of women behind the pattern, until the yellow and the ghosts behind the walls eventually take over.
The columns are made of yellow plaster. They are flowers, as if they were cut out and pulled out of the wall, now standing as heavy sculptural forms in the middle of the room.
Wallpaper with ghost, flower, thermometer and turtle emojis
Digital pattern design, print on paper, flour glue
2017
I, in turn, made my own wallpaper, using emojis for the pattern. Wallpapers and tapestries used to function as a way to bring nature into domestic space. Other times, they depicted stories and narrations, often using symbols. I used the four emojis as symbols for my research (Ghost: fiction and horror/ Flower: nature, landscape theory/ Thermometer: parasites and disease as metaphors/ Turtle: slowed-down time).
The emojis multiply in the pattern -- their green colour alluding to a natural web or a digital one.
Additionally, I was interested in how a landscape can be seen as a living whole, rather than a static image. Indoor spaces are also much more active than they seem. My room in anything but a private, intimate space, since different social interactions take place through social media.
Different times coexist simultaneously, like transparencies stacked on top of each other in no order. They occasionally overlap. Glitch.
Special thanks to: Nadia Coula, Loukas Loukidis, Nikos Tranos, Nikos Vratsanos, Arnisa Zeqo.