• Projects

The Seven Circuits of a Pearl

The Seven Circuits of a Pearl is a visual exploration of my uneasy process to narrate the secret findings in my late father’s maritime archive through the historic, symbolic and material interpretations of the pearl. At first encountered in the form of a pearl necklace, my father’s, unknown to me, ex-wife appears to wear in his records, it becomes the shiny detail for the reciprocal exchange and anamorphosis of maritime histories between my homeland Greece and my current place of residence in Australia’s west; the ‘Pearling Capital of the World’ from over a century ago.

Developed in the intersection of archives, geographies and material practices, the work reveals the ways in which history is not just a matter of chronology but also a question of space and relationships. Each circuit, in that sense, tells a complex composite truth stretching beyond historical facts and towards new subjective relationships between visual registers, the personal and the political. Staging a memory of a trauma while performing a history of the natural world, the inquiry oscillates between the dialectics of the small and the large where the intimate and the infinite find each other and me as an artist myself.

Amid wild marine mollusc pearls observed under the microscope, archaeological evidence of lost pearling luggers wrecked at the bottom of the ocean and the discovery of a half-brother I have never met but in the depths of my father’s archive, I attempt to stay afloat while diving deep inside the oceans of the forever unknown and continuously reformed in my family history and creative practice.

Maritime disasters, archaeological, personal and missing evidence, become the thread between visual and textual material from museum collections, journals, diaries and memoirs researched, and further re-imagined though the mixed-media works produced, aiming at creating an interrelational space amongst the fragments of a larger narrative progressing from an investigative to a more metaphorical and esoteric resolution.

In a parallel way, the work reflects on the multifaceted and multimodal exchange, trade and commodification of pearls in relation to broader histories of empire, labour management and marine ecology, questioning not only whether humans exist in relation to history, but instead how to access and write the history of this relationship in contemporary art as an emergent response to an ecosystem and cultural heritage in crisis.