Who am I?

• Butter Wall 2000
  1t of Butter, timber, metal 300cm x 300cm x 50cm
• Love Carpet 2000
  Fir-cones, mesh, 200cm x 800cm x 5-7cm
• Sweet Red 2000
  5 x 500kg each slices of Red Canadian timber, 200cm x 200cm x 15cm

ArtSway, Contemporary Visual Arts Centre, New Forest, 2000

Elpida 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 was made up of 3 new installations especially created for each of ArtSway's gallery spaces: Love Carpet, Butter Wall and Sweet Red.

‘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 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.

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...

extract from commissioned text by Alison Wilding that accompanies this exhibition.