ATHANASIA-IRIS GIAXIDIS
I was born and raised in Holland. After my studies i returned to my beloved Greece, a life-long dream.
Living in Greece, I started missing my “other” country, Holland, so these last years I divide my time between my two home countries.
But if you ask me and I’m forced to choose, I’d say I come from a small village of Evros, in Thrace, called “Mikra Kavissos”.
We find references to a city in Thrace called KAVISSOS in Homer’s Iliad. “Mikra [little] Kavissos” today has few residents; less than 200… To me, though, this small patch of land is a paradise on earth… It’s where I belong.
Currently, I am studying at AKTO College /Middlesex University, to obtain a Bachelor of Fine Art & New Media,
Apart from painting and sculpture, I write fairytales, I teach, I am an artist in jewellery and various artifacts (mostly from papier mache).
I use a wide range of materials: acrylics, charcoal, indian ink, natural pigments, metals, glass, resins, clay, papier mache and papyrus.
It’s a great challenge each time I “discover” and use a new material.
To me, Art is not a profession, but a way of life and an endeavor to pursue and comprehend truth.My work
consists of a system of ingenious devices which, through the function, architecturally bal- ance the structure of my philo- sophical beliefs. My concepts are our concerns. Our queries. Our questions about the origin of the world… About our existence. My work relates anything our im- agination can possibly conceive during our personal course on this mundane plane. I draw from familiar sources which bring for- ward patterns that were incorpo- rated centuries ago in our collec- tive unconscious . My subjects are archetypal and primeval. They are
fragments of mankind’s memory and distant past. My work is dramatically autobiographical. It raises questions. It seems to emanate from chaos, but it bears a peculiar intrinsic order.
If art is a safeguard of mental health, the path is painful. Because it dramati- cally coincides with the affinity of another life which unfolds inside this one…
Besides, like Plato said in his theory of Ideas, “Knowledge and objective truth exist in an intelligible world beyond time and space”; perhaps I synchronize myself with that world during those moments… Who knows?