Foreign Saints
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, observances and surfaces remain recognisable, but they no longer sit inside a simple or settled belief.
The work addresses this through material rather than confession. Aluminium, pewter, printed image and hand embossing create surfaces that catch light and return it changed. The silver is not decoration. It is a memory of votive offerings, reflected flame and the quiet dialogue people hold with a greater power. Through that language, painful memory, treasured memory, news, poems, spirituality, war, parents' lives and love are given seriousness, pressure and light.
Foreign
The title keeps a difficult word active. It does not smooth it into the exotic or picturesque. It lets distance, otherness and reclamation remain present in the work.
Reflected metal
Aluminium, pewter, embossing and silvered surfaces catch and multiply light. The surface does not simply decorate the image; it activates it.
Hagiography of the Ordinary
The works use the language of icon and votive offering to mark ordinary life: memory, love, suffering, news, family history and the fragile act of living.
The Hagiography of the Ordinary is the method. The deeper issue is not explained in the form of confession. It is carried by surface, pressure, shine, icon memory and the transformation of ordinary experience into something briefly sacred.
The family icon
The family icon is the point of return. It is not only an image of a saint, but a domestic object, a memory of a house, and a small inheritance of light. By replacing the tin overlay with aluminium I was protecting the picture, but also acknowledging the power of the metal surface itself.
Saint
This work reinterprets the old family icon through printed and embossed aluminium. The saint becomes a charged surface, still carrying the memory of worship, but now opened to uncertainty, distance and re-reading.
The True Cross
The cross is treated as relief, emblem and reflective object. What interests me here is not only the symbol, but the way metal catches light and makes the image active. It glints, shifts and refuses to remain simply flat.
Half Forgotten Songs
Memory does not always return as a full story. Sometimes it arrives as a partial image, a half-remembered rhythm, a song, a figure, a fragment of religious or family language that still carries emotional force.
The Whole Body
The votive body connects the work directly to the small metal offerings found in Orthodox churches. It is an image of vulnerability, but also of appeal. The body is presented as something wounded, protected, offered and remembered.
Small Reliquary Head
The head is enclosed, but the charge of the work remains on the face and the metal surface: reflection, vulnerability and the sense that an ordinary presence can become something worth guarding.
Bricks and Mortar in Kherson
The branch also moves into contemporary suffering. A newsworthy event can enter the same visual language as an icon or votive. The metal insert does not make war decorative; it marks the event as something requiring witness.
The Island / Homeward Bound
These works carry the language of return, journey and shelter into print. The metal panel behaves like a small devotional interruption inside the image, a place where memory hardens into shine.
Saint George
Here the saint is reduced to a small metal field. It is closer to touch than to narrative. The hand, the pressure, the dent and the gleam all matter, because the surface itself becomes a form of recollection.
Flight
Flight turns the image into something two-sided, almost portable. It has the quality of an amulet or a small devotional object, but its subject is motion, vulnerability and the need to escape.
Other charged surfaces
Not every work needs a long explanation here. Together they show the range of the branch: scripture, votive experiment, book, body, display, pressure, reflection and shine.
Foreign Saints does not resolve the word foreign. It gives it a surface. Metal, print, pressure and reflected light allow the inherited, the displaced and the ordinary to return as something luminous without being made simple.
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