Personal Maps
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 rupture, print, drawing and witness. Here those concerns became a working language of place, not cartography as measurement, but place as emotional evidence.
Place, loss and inherited memory
The work grows from family displacement, Cretan childhood, Asia Minor histories, parents' stories, faith, fragments and the long effort to understand where a family has come from.
Maps become faces
The map stops being only a topography. It becomes a body, a portrait, a wound, a poem and a way of carrying places that cannot be returned to simply.
DNA, public history and return
The language developed here leads towards Lazarus, Recovered Histories, the Istanbul work, votive objects, illuminated surfaces and the wider archive practice.
A beginning
The work began with simple descriptive maps, but quickly moved beyond description. I was not making neutral diagrams. I was returning to held places, half remembered places and places damaged by history.
Writing, stains and drawn fragments became part of the surface. The page began to behave like an archive.
Map / Chandaka
Map was one of the first images where the face became a site. The history of Heraklion, Chandakas, Candia and the older layers of Crete spread across the shaded areas like an unfamiliar script.
The four sheets remained visible, like folds in a manuscript or map. That break in the surface mattered. It showed the image as something assembled, not seamless.
Like a map on my skin, your many lives weigh me down.
A Map of Then
This was not a precise village map. It became an amalgam of places and feelings: streets without signs, houses remembered or imagined, childhood routes, hidden places, abandoned buildings and fragments of rural Crete.
Here the map becomes a carrier of social memory. It records not only where things were, but how a place felt when it still had people, voices and use.
My Personal Istanbul
Istanbul, or Constantinople, entered the work as a city known from a distance: through my father's memories, hearsay, images and inherited feeling. I could not claim it as direct knowledge.
That distance became part of the truth of the image. The city is imagined, loved, contradicted and unresolved. It is an emotional map of what is there and what is no longer there.
Izmir
This face carries the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, but it also carries the promise of new life. The woman in the image is a version of my grandmother, carrying my mother through catastrophe.
The work refuses to leave the event only as ruin. It looks for love, reconciliation and survival inside the ashes.
Let us then look for love in the new ruins.
Smyrna / Izmir
Maps can help us navigate emotions, not just physical topographies. In this work I tried to re-imagine my mother's hometown before the fire of 1922, beginning with the Punta area and working from insurance maps, photographs, street views and archive advice.
It is not a claim to historical certainty. It is a re-imagining, a ghost map and an act of return to a place that cannot be returned to in any ordinary way.
Stories from My Mother
My mother was the main source of cultural knowledge in the family. She held stories, food, humour, warnings, folk tales, grief and memory. Some things disappeared with her, but much of what she carried lives on in her children and grandchildren.
This work is part portrait and part listening device. It asks what happens when oral memory becomes image, and when the voice that carried it is no longer present.
Talisman
Talisman extends the map into body, faith, protection and inherited memory. It is connected to psychogeography, but also to votive objects, Orthodox silver offerings, apotropaic eyes, architecture, relics and family protection.
This is where mapping becomes ritualised. The work tries to reconcile, not alienate; to heal through forgiveness and protect through love.
I am not mapping places in order to possess them. I am mapping them because they have already entered me, through family, history, loss and love.
What this branch opened
Personal Maps gave me a working language for later projects. It showed me that inherited geography could be carried by a body, a fragment, a poem or a printed surface. A remembered place did not need to be fixed as a document; it could remain provisional, layered and alive.
From here, later branches could grow: DNA and ancestry in Lazarus, public witness in Recovered Histories, Istanbul as living return, and the continuing movement between print, object, light and memory.
Personal Maps was not the trunk of the practice, but it made one of its earliest languages visible. It taught me that place could be carried as drawing, poem, family testimony and a fragile route back to what had been scattered.
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