Who am I?

Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva was artist-in-residence during summer 1999 as part of ArtSway's "The World of Our Landscape" A4E programme funded by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of England.

This exhibition is made up of new work specifically created for each of ArtSway's gallery spaces. Elpida is a graduate of Glasgow School of Art and The Royal College, London whose work uses natural materials to explore ideas of form and space, memory and the concealed.

‘The forest is a symbol of the unknown, the untamed. We speak of the wild wood, home to animals, not man. Our relationship to individual trees is complex, puzzling.

For Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva the forest is a secret place, its floor a membrane that separates it from the underground where the tree’s root structure echoes the configuration of its branches – the tips of which brush that other membrane, the sky.

Large trucks of ancient forest still exist in Elpida”s native Macedonia. The New Forest, where she has recently been living and working is a more controlled and managed environment, which nevertheless casts its own spell.

Ideas of order and control are manifested in these works: the trunk of a redwood tree is sliced into disks and hung like drying meat – the massiveness of the tree re-organised in suspension. Likewise fir cones are seen in an unfamiliar context; for Elpida the fir cone ‘carpet’ becomes a veil, closing off one space from another beyond it, shuffling the layers of landscape. In a third work, butter which is normally kept cool, wrapped and put away is here stripped and exposed, used as building blocks.

Elpida’s project is to grasp fearlessly and ambitiously these emblems of the natural world, and use them as the stuff of her art.’

Alison Wilding, January 2000