Shrine

Site specific installation in a condemned house, comprised of charcoal and acrylic on wrapping paper, watercolours, etchings and ceramic tablets.
2013

Exhibition: Passage from North to South, Putsebocht, Rotterdam
Curator: Wilma Kun.
Photos: Kiki Petratou.

A shrine (Latin: scrinium, ‘case or chest for books or papers’; Old French: escrin ‘box or case’) is a holy or sacred place, which is dedicated to a specific deity, ancestor, hero, martyr, saint, daemon or similar figure of awe and respect, at which they are venerated or worshipped. (Wikipedia)

My informal research notes are sedimented in the pages of my sketchbooks. Quite often, there are portraits of authors, artists, architects, film and theatre directors, musicians, poets, philosophers. In collecting these ‘wise men,’ I realize that they also form an incomplete spiritual family tree.
To expand the intimate sphere of the book to a habitable spatial context, I translated some drawings to a large format ‘wall paper’ of cheap packing paper. The wall drawings function as a décor for the individual portraits, a kind of stage for the characters to appear on.
The Oliver Goldsmith rhyme and the fragment of dialogue from Thomas More’s Utopia are about the enclosure of the English Commons in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when common fields were appropriated by landowners and the church.