GEORGE SFOUGARAS ARTWORKS

Sculpture of Poseidon and studio creature. A few hours ago, I did something I hadn't expected to do. I started a podcast. Not because the world needs another podcast, and certainly not because I wanted to make one about artificial intelligence. There are already plenty of those. What interested me was something rather different. For most of my working life, the important conversations have happened in private. They begin with a sketch, a memory, a fragment of history or a question that refuses to disappear. Before any sculpture exists, before an exhibition is planned, there is a period where an idea is uncertain. It isn't finished enough to defend, but it isn't weak enough to abandon. Those are the conversations we almost never hear. Thinking in Public The podcast is called Coevolution. The title took longer than the first recording. Someone suggested Man and Machine. It sounded dramatic, but it also fixed the relationship too quickly. It implied opposition, as though one s...

Practice Map, July 2026   I have been trying to see the shape of my own practice more clearly. This map is not a complete catalogue, and it is not a timeline in the usual sense. It is a selective atlas of branches, roots and cross-connections.  It shows how projects that once felt separate have grown from the same deeper concerns: inherited memory, displacement, identity, witness, repair, sacred images, ordinary lives, and the expanded field of printmaking. Looking at it flattened into a single image is oddly clarifying. Personal Maps, Recovered Histories, Foreign Saints, Istanbul, Vessels, Traces, and the newer archive work are not isolated projects. They are conversations with each other. Some lines are direct. Others are quieter, more subterranean. The roots are still family history, migration, Orthodox upbringing, place, archive, belonging, and reconciliation.  The archive is not just storage. It is a living source. Website pages, posts, objects, documents,...

George Sfougaras Foreign Saints The Hagiography of the Ordinary The Charged Surface Branch Foreign Saints is a deliberately unsettled title. It holds the word foreign as pressure, not ornament. The work answers through reflected metal, votive surface, icon memory and the moment ordinary experience begins to shine. ✦   ✦   ✦ The starting point is the icon. In our home in Crete there was an image of Saint Nikolaos, printed in Athens in the 1950s and framed by a tin overlay. I later replaced that overlay with aluminium, partly to protect the image, but also because the metal carried something older. Silver, and to a lesser extent gold, caught the light of thin candles inside dark Orthodox churches. To the child’s eye that light was both holy and magical. Foreign here is not exotic. It names distance, estrangement and the altered life of inherited images when they move between countries, homes, churches, memories and works of art. The saints, icons, foods, obser...

George Sfougaras · 2016 to 2017 Personal Maps Printed works on the theme of sense of place and identity The Maps Branch Personal Maps is the branch where place first became a language of inheritance. I began by drawing maps, but the drawings soon gathered faces, poems, family stories and symbolic signs. They became attempts to hold places altered by migration, war, forgetting and time. ✦ ✦ ✦ I started to draw simple descriptive maps around May 2016. The work came unexpectedly from a deep need to revisit my past and understand our family history. Childhood places, family stories, lost towns and damaged histories returned in a simplified linear form. As I worked, a symbolic alphabet became clearer. Boats stood for change and transition. Waves carried arduous journeys. Trees held hope. Faces, coastlines, buildings and fragments of writing became vessels for memory. This branch grows from the older trunk of displacement, inherited memory, sacred fragments, family ruptu...

DNA · ancestry · migration · 2018 Lazarus A collective body of works where DNA, ancestral movement, maps, faces and lost places begin to form one field of memory. Following my explorations in DNA analysis, I began to trace the movements of my ancestors around the world. At a certain point it felt as if I was trying to resurrect the past. Lazarus · DNA 2018 ✦ This is a branch, not the trunk. Lazarus is the ancestral-recovery branch in which DNA analysis, maps, faces, named places and remembered ancestors join the older concerns of displacement, faith, archive and print. The 2018 Lazarus page describes a collective body of works, not a single image. Kırkağaç , Kelempes and Ancestors belong inside that body because maps, lost places and remembered ancestral faces are central to the series. Older root Maps and inherited geography Before Lazarus there were the personal maps, the lost places, the family stories and the recurring question of how a person carries geogr...

George Sfougaras · 2019 Recovered Histories Metaphors of historical events, changing identities and fluid political landscapes. “What is uncovered here is light and love, deep and wide enough to embrace all our stories.” Rita Hindocha, from the foreword; arrived as a refugee from Uganda, 1972 ◆   ◆   ◆ Recovered Histories is not the trunk of the work, but one of its clearest public branches. The trunk is older and wider: inherited memory, displacement, archive, faith, loss, witness, repair and the material language of print. In this project those concerns entered a public, collaborative and civic form. Older trunk The continuing root system The work comes from a longer practice concerned with inherited memory, family rupture, faith, sacred fragments, migration, archive, print, object and light. This branch A public and civic form Here those private and ancestral concerns opened outwards into shared testimony, public history and collaborative rememb...