Christina Sgouromiti

Camberwell College of Arts: BA Hons. Painting

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Backyard, oil on canvas, 2001, 71x51 cm

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Dividing the space into smooth and striated areas, is like allowing oneself to move inside it by following a set course of traits, and at the same time, provide room for vagabondage, for wandering and drifting, freely. The two interact in various ways. To disorient; to create tension and release. Linear striation provides with precise paths, whereas smooth forms allow for considerable "irregularity".
In a similar way, we could perceive the division between light and dark areas. While light space is eliminated by the materiality (of objects), darkness is "filled", it touches the individual directly, envelops it, penetrates it. The feeling of mystery that one experiences at night, could not come from anything else.


I started by investigating a site 's particular character and chose to paint abandoned spaces with strong "impersonal" status, like gymnasiums and parkways.
They are "places of memory", a world surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and the ephemeral. But these "non-places" are the real measure of our time. Foucault has prophetically said that the present epoch is perhaps above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity and juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time, and more that of a network that connects points and intersections with its own skeim.

I am interested in the theatricality of a space. Places, traces, emptiness, are standing for silences, absences, missed opportunities. There is a dimension of sequence, open seriality, the cinematic, dramaturgy, choreography. A structure as this is not just a location of events, but a place for these events. A place-to-happen that constitutes a veritable "scenography of passage", and passage like event, has "temporal" as well as "spatial" properties.
It is a little bit like turning the city into a memory theatre, where one is invited to think about the places one has inhabited or experienced. And since the body is said to be the "vehicle of space", there is a sense of one's wandering, despite the absence of the actual figure. Just like in walking we move into a near-sphere of our own choosing, if not of our own making. In this sphere, we encounter places as much as we enliven them. The result is a place-world that is the correlate of the living body.
The here and the there, body and space, realism and the poetic, all meet finally-or rather, begin - in place.

Christina Sgouromiti

Camberwell College of Arts: BA Hons. Painting