Guardian Sheep

The Human Being is longing for security, experiencing the struggle of its Existence to maintain integrity and not to perish. Life with Hope to challenge the stagnation experienced by the passive feeling of security, using the tools of the paradox and the unexpected.

Stagnation is Death.The movement towards the other person is Life. If we accept that the opposite of fear is Love, we could say that only those who managed to bridge worlds on their journey have experienced their existence. Only those who have been met by others or felt love by others and for others in this very Life! And for as long as the artist and the psychotherapist are transmuting the human Trauma into something meaningful instead of something detrimental,Therapy will be revealed by the intensity of care rather than the intensity of justification; in a hug rather than in isolation; under the warmth of light rather than the cold darkness.

The project “Guardian Sheep” is a proposal of a therapeutic experience for both the artist herself and her visitors. The exhibition of EvelynWallner Papadopoulou artworks is not referred within the objective timeframe but it rather refers to a timeless memory.A memory from that very early experience of Love, untouched by the rationality of the adult life,an experience felt like the absolute white,an explosion of a psychosomatic participation in touching the velvet wool, the first touch, the first stroke, the selflessness of the maternal affection that prefers the secure and steady gaze of a peaceful coexistence and the innocence of the ability to protect against the feeling of desperation, brought by the Trauma in Life.

Then, the answer to Pain was a hug and the silence confessing that you exist. Now, together, artworks of painting, photography and installations, alert all the senses, inviting one in a play between the treated and the untreated, an attempt to destabilize the certainty of a clearly determined adult rationality, to remain for a short period of time unsettled, sacrifice, care, hope, relationship, light, reestablishing the meaning of an even more mature and true Love.

Alexis Lappas
Dr Psychiatrist - Psychotherapist

Wächter-Schafe

Der Mensch sehnt sich im Kampf seiner Existenz nach Sicherheit, um die Integrität aufrechtzuerhalten und nicht unterzugehen. Der Stagnation des passiven Sicherheitsgefühls stellt das Leben selbst die Hoffnung gegenüber und benutzt dabei als Werkzeuge das Paradoxe und das Unerwartete.

Stillstand ist Tod. Die Bewegung zum Anderen hin ist das Leben. Wenn das Gegenteil von Angst Liebe ist, haben nur die, die Welten überbrückten, ihre Existenz wahrgenommen. Nur die, die mit anderen Menschen zusammengekommen sind, die geliebt wurden, und geliebt haben, in diesem Leben!

Und solange der Künstler und der Psychotherapeut das menschliche Trauma in etwas Sinnvolles anstatt in etwas Negatives verwandeln, wird die Therapie eher durch die Intensität der Fürsorge als durch die Intensität der Rechtfertigung offenbart, in einer Umarmung statt in Isolation,  im warmen Licht statt in kalter Dunkelheit.

Das Projekt „Guardian Sheep – Wächter-Schafe“ ist ein Vorschlag als therapeutisches Erlebnis der Künstlerin und für ihre Besucher. Die Kunstwerke von Evelyn W. Papadopoulou sind nicht auf einen objektiven Zeitraum beschränkt, sondern weisen auf eine zeitlose Erinnerung. Eine Erinnerung an diese sehr frühe Erfahrung von Liebe, unberührt von der Vernunft des Erwachsenenlebens, eine Erfahrung, die sich wie das absolute Weiß anfühlte, eine Explosion von psychosomatischer Beteiligung an der Berührung der Samtwolle, der ersten Berührung, der ersten Liebkosung, der Selbstlosigkeit mütterlicher Zuneigung, die den sicheren und beständigen Blick eines friedlichen Zusammenlebens bevorzugt und die Unschuld der Fähigkeit, sich vor dem Gefühl der Verzweiflung zu schützen, das das Trauma im Leben mit sich bringt.

Damals war die Antwort auf Schmerz eine Umarmung und das Schweigen, das bewies, dass man lebte. Jetzt werden alle Sinne mobilisiert, Kunstwerke aus Malerei, Fotografie und dynamische Installationen laden die Teilnehmer ein zu einem Spiel zwischen Behandeltem und Unbehandeltem, um die Gewissheit einer klar bestimmten Erwachsenenrationalität zu destabilisieren, und damit wir für eine kurze Zeit verunsichert, Opfer, Fürsorge, Hoffnung, Beziehung, Licht, neue Bedeutung einer noch reiferen und wahren Liebe bleiben.

Dr. Alexis Lappas,

Psychologe - Psychotherapeut 

Threads- Meanings. From the material to the intangible

 Evelyn Wallner Papadopoulou offers us an unconstrained, original, dense in meaning and polysemous work which both signifies and is signified.  Her advanced implementation techniques, paintings and creations with textile art elements, are put together in installations, creating a dynamic, artistic and semiotic space. She handles with ease threads as well as paintbrushes and her up-to-date and timeless- compositions are characterised by touching sensitivity and ontological power. Her work reveals immediacy and consistency as well as her inner path and her visual and deeply spiritual pursuits.

Τhe Lamb consists the work’s thematic dominant with all the semantic cargo it carries.

Wool is a protagonist in her works. Her artistic adventure progresses in landscapes of time, as she draws out traditional old time weaving techniques relating to female hypostasis which she employs to reconstruct the wefts of a primordial memory. Wool is a ground of memory. It has poetic, economic, ritualistic and political power. It is related to metaphor, transpositions and allegories. It is found in language, worship and myths. It connects the Real with the Symbolic and the Imaginary. Viewers are confronted with reality, memories and emergence of the subconscious.

Evelyn Wallner Papadopoulou transforms a very difficult material, wool, to works with plasticity potential and extensions, giving to its material structure a new expressive, aesthetic and ideologic content, transforming an ancient art to contemporary artistic expression. She creates images of an archetypal look and structure with an autonomous visual entity. She is focused and she is in tune with nature’s rhythms. She masters the technique and the absolute craftsmanship. Her preference for colors of nature validates and increases the instrumental and organic power of wool. Matter is dominant, structural and self-sufficient. She does not modify or beautify it; she does not exhaustingly process it. She dexterously examines, like a ritual of acceptance and refamiliarization of memory, the matter substance, texture, defense, fragility, wear and duration. In her work, colors, plasticity, texture, traces and shadows transmute to units of meaning, words of communication and the final set functions as a multi powerful installation as well as a text with conceptual strength, various co-statements and symbolisms. The artist invites viewers to dive within emotions, to decode with their own eyes and heart Evelyn Wallner Papadopoulou’s work and to “read’ her authentic creation narrative, which is a field of interpretation and resignification. Every viewing of her work is an act of reading and meaning allocation. We refer to the images as “texts” as they too can produce meaning; we are reminded that motives and colors, contribute to signification just like words do. From this point of view, theory is a practice, a way of interacting with the piece of art. Etymologically, theory is defined as an act of viewing, of study and it is connected to visuality, lifting the contrast between the artistic/visual and discursive, between the image and word or practice and theory.

Evelyn Wallner Papadopoulou’s work certifies the active nature οf signification. It depicts a true artist’s wish to make sense of the world. Her work goes beyond a perceived-through-the-eyes reality and touches the transcendental, searching for meaning in the process of semiosis, the tension between the social and the semiotic, the emphasis in the psychosymbolic level of subjectivity and discursive -cultural practices. Her creations remind us that subjectivity consists a complex interweaving of physical, imaginary and symbolic levels, as they function through body and meaning thresholds as well as corporality and symbolization. According to Julia Kristeva, who established semanalysis, art is a signifying practice to the point of exchange between the unity of the “symbolic” and the process of the “semiotic”. The semiotic chora is the maternal and poetic dimension field of language. It is connected with pre-linguistic elements, the maternal body, feelings, touch, rhythms, sounds, tonalities, multiplicity, liquidity, heterogeny of art practices and their conceptual plethora. The semiotic dimension is instantiated in the work we have before us.

In her “White and Black Sheep”, the creator handles wool like painting material, as the various shades thread fibers lead to a painting outcome, with vibration, relief and plasticity. The esotericism, the non-iconic, the emphasis on mobile elements produce exceptional results of expression. Matter color episodes, shades that interchange and various levels sequence emanate the rhythm and vibration of an impressionistic and expressionistic touch. This threefold allows multiple readings, bringing to mind Lacan’s categories of Symbolic and Imaginary, which consist two representation factors and two levels of subjectivity. The black and white contrast play a role in an economy of desire and an economy of power. This proves the ambiguity of multiple dualities as well, which characterize fantasies formed from the imaginary. The possibility of vocalizing the self is produced through a series of segregations and direction around the identification with the Other/others, as well as subconscious operations, emotional pressures existing in cultural glossary.

In particular, in the "White and Black Sheep" piece, the artist attempts to combine contrasts in a juxtaposing color harmony, visual and conceptual, wishing to abolish dividing hierarchical concepts. She creates a new term which includes both bipolar definitions (white-black), but goes beyond their margins. It knocks down the binary contrasts, moving the negative term by indicating that it is a precondition of the positive, proposing Derrida’s concept of supplementarity. The meaning does not arise through the confrontation of the two terms, but through a difference and it is infinitely multiplied, constantly shifted, produced by the differences of the signified at the level of the signifier. Through emotional channels of artistic practice and imagination within the image, the creator gives us experiences and dimensions beyond the dichotomous view of one and its Other. It awakens us on historical and social structures that operate at the level of the unconscious. Its threads create connectivity, solidarity and love flows. The linkage of weaving art with some form of political attitude has been known since antiquity. Plato in his “Republic” proposes the unifying role of the politician, likening him to that of the weaver, considering weaving as both peace as well as opposing tendencies coexistence. In her work we trace elements of another, matrixial dimension or layer, where meaning and subjectivity are created not by severance and a loss / absence economy but by the encounter, multiplicity, transformational influences and co-emergence in a creative «Matrixial Borderspace». The work illustrates the division, exclusion, reductionism, the various rejections and demarcations that apportion the human, substantiating the quote: "From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth. " (Acts 17:26)

In "Golden Fleece" the creator widens the possibilities of the surface by imposing the real space. The transformations she makes wool go through transform it into a malleable means of painting, sculpture or architectural composition while emphasize its symbolic and real role and immerse us in the maternal semiotic. It replicates old, forgotten narratives, showing that these works are part of a sequence, incorporating a pre-existing fantastic reality, and that myths continue to structure man’s experience in the present, by keeping memory tracks of long-lasting psychic dramas in cultural consciousness.

The “Cascade” project is an emblematic installation. Free bundles of different texture, quality, mode and degree of processing wool - from transparent, airy and totally white to undyed and untreated flow"like rain upon the mown", run through the surface and overflow leading to abundant dense matter, that of raw wool. Other classes of meaning effortlessly emerge from her work, symbolic signifier, surpassing sensory, biological or real identities. The maternal semiotic is active in this artistic work as well, focusing on the symbol of the Virgin. The transparency, the purity of the woolen cascade signifies the greeting to the Virgin, the Pure, Untainted, Life-giving Spring: "Rejoice, bedewed fleece, which Gideon, O Virgin, foresaw.” (Canon from the Akathist Hymn).

The wool, the fleece, refers to a preface to the Virgin at the old Testament Book of Judges, when she receives the Dew of Heaven, the Holy Spirit. The Virgin obeys the Divine Will in order to minister God's plans of    Devine Word incarnation and deification, both for the sake of man and she thus brings to the world " a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:15). "The bedewed divine fleece, Oh holly Virgin, has watered my withered and wounded from evil spirits soul, as You visited me with the life-giving water of Christ the Lord," prays Saint Markos Eugenikos. 

The work’s cascade extends to space, floods the world and transforms mankind. "(You Jesus Christ) have cleaned the whole world from every pollution...The Holy Spirit washes away (sin)...Through immaculate water flows you rinsed out all darkness.” (St. John Damascene, iambic canon for Epiphany).

Evelyn Wallner Papadopoulou with sensitivity gives her work a poetic dimension and evocative character without slipping into descriptiveness and decoration. Wool as a living entity, extends into space, shapes it and rearranges it. It becomes embossed spherical volume, flowing matter, a transparent or dense surface. As a master of this technique and knowing the specifics of the material, the creator surpasses any technical limitations. With gestural writing, density and transparency interaction, she creates a tactile and immaterial installation that signifies catharsis, purification, healing, regeneration and salvation.

In the “Sea of Blood” the corporality of the explosive, bleeding, dense dye is plastically structured and semantically charged. The boldness and momentum of the hemorrhaging aggressive hot red is a symbolic and crucial perforation, breaking through the mild colors of the rest of the compositions, bringing to mind the bleeding red boundaries of our time, highlighting elements of annihilation and destruction which often characterize the modern world, the atrocities of a hemorrhaging moment in History. In the context of the global condition, in an environment of violence, massive imposed displacements, homelessness and geopolitical asymmetries, wretchedness and extermination of the Other dominate and people drench in  blood. In “Sea of blood” the viewer traces through episodes of matter, human voices and traumatic stories. He hears the voices, the cries of the victims.

“Terrorist Attack”. This is the only work in all of the artist’s compositions, where human form is represented, wounded and vulnerable. Time in this work consists the fourth dimension and it is not only the linear but also the circular, the monumental, the no-time of the traumatic. The work visualizes the poetics of trauma and memory, individual and collective, of the memorial. The painter articulates a Reason for opposing violence and blind mass destruction models. When meaning is nullified, people have to seek, they need a thread to guide them. Wool is also associated with healing, with redress on a symbolic level ...

In “Heidi”, the painter, with an ability to penetrate to what is substantial, brings the viewer in confrontation with the interactive relation between the sheep and the slaughter of people in the previous work. The lamb is a symbol, portraying the slaughter of every innocent. Eloquent signifiers are the way of depicting an "impersonated" sheep, its position in the work, its strict frontality, its monumentality, the scale, the black background, its placement with respect to the viewer, the glance of the eyes. In the excellent iconographic and stylistic rendering, one can detect the plastic values ​​of the thread. Small touches weave the painted surface, and the shape of the sheep is boldly displayed, paintings and sculptures, through intense shades and color contrasts. The painter, penetrating, judging, through good management of symbols and with honesty, hints at a material and poetic dimension, posing questions of moral nature with persistence.

“Guardian Sheep". The two lambs, emblematic, dominantly seated on a monumental stepped podium, through imposing shades of light, signify the power of fragility, the victory through kindness, patience, virtue and forbearance. Evelyn Wallner Papadopoulou destabilizes the narcissistic aspect of the blatantly powerful, showing that real power is vulnerable. "Love is the only guarantee of guard," she told me in a meeting. With this work she pays tribute to the misfit, the forgotten, the weak, the silent and the silenced, the one who has been outcasted through overbearingly domineering practices and hegemonic attitude. 

The Lamb-Guard is a powerful symbolic invocation, re-passing and emotional refamiliarization of theological inscriptions. “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” (John 10:11-12) while the Virgin is praised: “Rejoice, mother of the Lamb and Shepherd; Rejoice, sheepfold of spiritual sheep. Rejoice, defense against invisible enemies;” (Akathist Hymn Canon, second stasis)

“Offering". It is the culmination of all of Evelyn Wallner Papadopoulou’s creations. The Crucifixion scene, the death of the Son of Man, which occurs according to divine consent for the salvation of the world, is rendered immaculately through painting, humbly, with inwardness, and deep awareness of Truth. The Savior and Redeemer of the world "hangs on wood", lifeless, leaning his head to the side. His hands embrace all mankind. He offers Himself, and beats death with Resurrection, “For the life and Salvation of the world". 

Wool is polysemous in this work. The artist has arranged it in front of the Crucified with care and respect, in a slightly reclining manner, signifying both the Manger and the Tomb, the swaddling cloths of the humble manger "And then came that one ... and he did this, and she turned her off in the midst, and brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger” (Luke 2: 7:), but at the same time, a shroud-sudarion (handkerchief)-othonio (linen cloth), the one that wraps His Pure Body, the one that the Myrrhophore  found on the empty Tomb. (Matthew 28: 1-7, Mark 16: 1-7, Luke 24: 1-8, 12, John 20: 1-10). “… and went into the sepulcher, and sees the linen clothes lie, And the handkerchief, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.” (John 20:6-7).  

The Lamb is a mark that condenses the whole Divine Economy. The point where eternity meets time, the extramundane enters the mundane, the Timeless enters history, (Devine) Word becomes Flesh. The immaterial Devine Word was crucified and resurrected from infinite, boundless Love. John the Baptist exclaims about the Lord when he saw Jesus coming toward him the next day: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29), while the prophet Isaiah “…he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent”. (Isaiah 53,7). “Knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold,  but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of  a lamb without blemish or spot.” (Peter 1:18-19)

The Cross is the Supreme act of Love. The Cross, a prerequisite of Resurrection, creates a possibility for the Kingdom of Eternity. The Kingdom of God is the Kingdom of the Slaughtered Lamb. The Triumph of the Slaughtered Lamb through the Immaculate Sacrifice.

  Today, human life is perceived through multiple grids of ruling structures and knowledge/power co-structures. In contrast to various versions of relations of power - tyrannical or more covered - that crush the powerless, the only power of Love remains the Incarnated Son of God. Christ's teaching goes beyond epistemological certainties, status order, legal and biopolitical practices, regulating technocratic logistics and governing. Christ, unlike the mighty ones of the earth, has revealed a supreme power through humbleness, extreme pain, the Sacrifice of Crucifixion, enduring willingly Pathos (Suffering). The omnipotence of God is Love and it is substantiated through Divine Providence, Divine Mercy, Divine Justice. 

Evelyn Wallner Papadopoulou manages the consecrated conceptual weight, with boldness, consciousness and care. Her work composes the narrative of an original author. She unites silence with prayer. Once more, she picks up threads of her own as well as everyone’s memory. She interlaces together the threads of wool and thought, the mystery of existence, inviting the viewer to weave their own narrative. The invocative charge of her works submerges us into archetype, the fiber of our existence, the threadlike texture of reality, as well as the Eternal. It shows us that beyond the visual-material reality, the convergence of time and time, the spirit, the soul searches for the other dimension, the Divine Eternity and reaches out towards it. The Truth of Love. "Aesthetic practices account for the assembly of political knowledge. Ethics are an important parameter of aesthetic practices. “What I call aesthetic practices is nothing but the answer to the eternal question of ethics, " Julia Kristeva claims.  The work of Wallner-Papadopoulou gives us, raises aesthetic, theoretical, political and ethical concerns. The pious gesture, Evelyn's poetics, marks the need for an identity rediscovery. 

"We have the choice of Love and we do not see it," are the words of the creator herself.

Dr Anastasia Paka, Phd History of Art, Curator of Collections, Tellogleion Fine Arts Foundation

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Evelyn