Empty Dress

Drawing with ink is something that came into my work seven years ago and has never left me ever since.
It was a totally new medium for me that grew immensely inside me, making me express myself in a totally different way.

I’ve been gathering stories from women for almost 7 years now.

Women of all ages and backgrounds.
Each story is beautiful, painful, strong, hopeful, sad, exactly like life itself.

I thank all the women that trusted me and will trust me with their stories.

I cherish them and honor them by putting their words and feelings into my work

Dapper Beat Art Magazine

Article 18, March 2018 by Bia Papadopoulou

Each drawing, a woman’s story!

Eleni Exarchou creates an interactive installation that unfolds in space like an audio-visual narrative. The work, entitled Empty dress, is composed of many small-scale drawings of the last two years, made with pen and ink, each of which comes into dialogue with the recorded speech of heterogeneous women.

Exarchou functions through antitheses. She draws on paper as if embroidering empty dresses, “absent women”, in compositions that interweave virtuosity and the love for detail with the surrealist automatic process. The women’s garments hover in an unidentified space with which they magically mingle, their motifs breaking the representative borders and expanding in the background. Resulting from a procedure of an absolute liberation of the self, these monochromatic works – at once tender and menacing– are full of repetitive symbolisms.

Flowers like lace coexist with thorns that are transmuted into dangerous barbed wire. Along with the roots of plants, they unravel in space as a ball of yarn. They map the painterly field which is inhabited by birds with enormous beaks, free or trapped in cages. In this environment, the targets frequently appearing seem to be presaging the imminent catastrophe or/and death. An idea reinforced by the burning and cutting of the drawing’s surface in an act of violent, fragmentary deconstruction of the image.

The work is the result of the artist’s research and interaction with the inconspicuous protagonists, present only through their recorded voice which the viewer is called to listen through the use of headphones. A personal relationship is thus established between the transmitter and the recipient, that is between the anonymous woman and the visitor to whom she confesses her story. The surrealism of the fantastic drawings is intermingled with the real experiences of existent people, or with the “amazing recipes” of life, as the artist poetically calls the women’s oral stories.

These drawings were initially inspired by Exarchou’s notes written in a series of personal note books to which she refers. Taking as a point of departure specific events of her own life, the artist moves away from them so as to empty her soul in identifying with the protagonists.

The process of producing the works is equally important with the final result, formed by the active participation of the women recounting their lives as sensitive, painful tales. The juxtaposition of each oral story and drawing is made by them who are temporarily transformed into composers/artists, revealing a world that is both sensitive and cruel, beautiful and ugly.

Bia Papadopoulou

Art Historian

Free-lance art curator