SHEFFIELD, UK – Raised Through // Mediations Through Art and Making is a participatory exhibition and think space, by Eirini Linardaki and Vincent Parisot on view at the Sheffield Hallam University Gallery, Old Head Post Office, Fitzalan Square, Sheffield S12AY, UK, through May 31, 10 AM-5 PM. It is a travelling and interactive body of work, where each new exhibition site builds on knowing and making gained from the previous location’s happenings, whilst also feeding forward to its next incarnation and location. The exhibition is a growing and evolving body of work and has already been participated in and exhibited at the Lower East Side Girls Club in New York and the John Jay College for Criminal Justice, New York.

This itinerant project uses visual arts and anthropological methods to make visible the heritage, values and shared human emotions which link individuals’ experiences and memories to other communities, and proposes a notion of identity and belonging grounded in mutuality and the broadest view of both messy histories and hopeful futures.

Raised Through is an exhibition of common and personal works including photographs, drawings, paintings, screen printing, collages and a magnetic installation with fragmented drawings.

Of the exhibition, Linardaki said: “There is a moment in every awoken night where the psyche dives into what seems to be an overwhelming whirlpool of emotions, images, anxieties. This can be a moment of truth and creation as well, where one meets with fantastic creatures, visual phenomena and other fantastic imagery, wordless encounters that become constructive visions, work to become. This is what the title Raised Through conveys, a moving experience, a moment of communication through the senses, of silent recognition of humans that look straight into the eye of the storm to find peace.”

Such encounters in this show are with Parisot’s Insomnia Owls, with their Nordic Gold coins, hollow eyes reflecting light, or the deconstructed magnetic drawings of forms that can be pieced together by visitors, recreating either fantastic drawings of animals or explosions throughout wars of the world. Parisot’s artworks evoke the possibilities of bringing together a fantastic world, artistic recurrent dreams from the deepest end of the night into the broad daylight for everyone to see and experience.

Linardaki’s Monster Series digital collages cover fires and explosions with fabrics and patterns. Unable to cope otherwise with the realities of the world destruction, she uses her collages to bring forward a constructive vision of monsters that swallow humanity in their path, much like in the painting Saturn Devouring His Son by Goya.

As Linardaki often says her childhood is her only country and an unlimited source of inspiration. One of her strongest childhood memories, the patterned sheets her mother used to keep her warm after her bath, nurtured her practice of collecting textiles throughout her career. This practice has proven valuable especially when she became a mother, setting up a “room of her own” where she could exist in a multitude of roles.

Her iconographic research spans from the fires at the Amazonian forest, explosions at sea, air strikes in Syria, puddles forming after the rain to photos of her own children and links with the Hindu demoness Pūtanā, mother of the infant-god Krisna showing the interrelated nature of ecological and feminist struggles.

More information about the exhibition is available online: https://gallery.shu.ac.uk/event/raised-through/.