Reflections on Names and Places
In Athens, where I was born, my parents gave me the name of an ancient Earth Goddess. Rea was a Titaness, the daughter of Uranus and Gaia, the mother of Zeus, who saved him from being eaten by his father, Cronos, by sending him away to be brought up on Mount Ida, in Crete, and giving Cronos a stone to eat instead.
In London, where I was baptised, my name was not considered "christian" and I was given my second name "Zoe", which, in the Greek Orthodox church is the festival of "Zóothóchou Pighis" (the Fountain of Life) celebrated on the first Friday after Good Friday: a moveable feast, changing from year to year.
My birthday, celebrated in England, was always the same: 9 November, Scorpio, a water sign, whereas my namesday (Zoe) which was celebrated in place of the birthday in Greece, was never the same. This dichotomy between the ordered certainties (real or perceived) of England and the exciting but uncertain delights of life in Greece has remained with me since my earliest years.
Certainty and uncertainty. Earth and Water.
Nurturing and the compulsion to put down roots / AGAINST/ the fluidity of the traveller and migrant in a world where there are no certainties.
Caught between Earth and Sky
We trace patterns
and tell stories
to fill the void
and find ourselves.
I have swum in the month of April in the freezing sapphire waters off the southern coast of Crete, gazing on snow capped Mount Ida close by and thought of how the ancients drew their stories from the landscape around them. For the mountains with their dips and hollows are like sleeping gods. (Protective and terrible - reflecting us and all our strengths and weaknesses, but on a grander scale).
Do Names Shape Destinies?
Matera is a town in Southern Italy.
The Greeks came here and the area was called "Magna Grecia". There are places nearby where the local dialect is similar to Ancient Greek.
MATERA - MITERA (MI-TERRA) - MOTHER - MADRE - MATTER - MATERIA
Earth and Matter: connections: real, perceived, invented, made real because we find/ create them.
The buildings of the old town, carved into tufo and built into the rock are of the earth and in the earth. They are curved like women's bodies. They expand and contract, enclosing, containing and keeping secrets.
The town has deserted labyrinthine streets that lead you on or shut you off so that you alternately lose and find yourself, tracing different patterns each time. It is both penetrable and impenetrable like one of Calvino's "Invisible Cities", a place of dreams and discoveries, an allegory, a fiction. Like the tunnels of the mind, existing as much through memory and imagination as in a tangible reality: a place of discovery and recognition.
Calvino gave each of his cities the name of a woman. Matera could be added to the list, but which of his eleven categories would she join? Desire? Memory? The subtle or the continuous city?
Locals call the old town "I Sassi": "The Stones", as if, like the Earth, it had existed long before Man's intervention.
Choròs / Chóros DANCE / SPACE
Many years ago, on my first visit to Matera, I made a quick sketch of a Greek dancer in profile, robes flowing like waves behind her, seen on a fragment of ancient art at the Museo Ridola. I no longer remember the context, whether she was on a vase or a relief, but after that first sketch I continued to explore the dancer's freedom in drawings and paintings, loving her weightlessness and the way she broke through bounds and boundaries.
I have continued to paint dancers.
The scale of a work reflects a particular need or compulsion.
The small paintings attempt to capture fleeting moments, cradled in the hand as I paint, they are intimate and immediate, recording life as it is being lived, unobtrusive in size but pulsing with energy like a heartbeat.
To paint is also to dance with the space: a painting can be the measure of my body in space. The larger formats are determined by the span of my arms and the space that I enter as I move back and forth transferring my energy to the painted surface. I explore rhythm in space.