Developed during an artist residency in Athens in the aftermath of Greece's financial crisis, The Sacred Body explores the tension between the idealized human body of classical antiquity and the vulnerability of contemporary lived experience. The work emerged from the striking contrast between the reverence afforded to ancient Greek civilization and the social and economic uncertainty confronting contemporary Greece.

Working across photography, plaster casting, collage, and material interventions, I explored the body as a site of identity, vulnerability, and transformation. I cast my own face in plaster and digitally overlaid its image onto a photograph of my living face, blurring the boundaries between flesh and sculpture, presence and representation. Other works brought my body into dialogue with classical sculpture, fractured surfaces, and veiled forms.

During this exploration, I encountered Nikos Erinakis's poem The New Symmetry, which gave language to questions already emerging through the work. Its questioning of oppositions resonated with my investigation of the sacred and the ordinary, the ancient and the contemporary, fragility and endurance—and the possibilities that emerge when these distinctions begin to dissolve.

[Portfolio]