ADMA 2024-2025

Following the Flickering Lights

When navigating at sea, sailors need to determine their position in order to steer the boat towards the desired destination. In deep water, far out in the ocean and far away from home, reference points are often out of reach.

With a compass, a paper map, a ruler and a pencil, explorers can locate their position on the horizon by defining a triangle. First, they anchor three landmark coordinates. With the collinear extensions of these three points, they can triangulate the boat’s position. The voyage can continue.

Following the Flickering Lights is an enquiry in correspondence and navigation that puts into dialogue my artistic practices of a researcher, jewellery-maker, craftswoman and educator with each other. Through experimentation in different writing formats, I juxtapose lived experiences with acquired knowledge. This exploration examines how writing and craft can activate one another to generate dialectical images that evoke discourse and sustain critical engagement.

The desire to work in this a way now, alights and is deeply shaped by my life trajectory: nearly 20 years of a nomadic existence across Germany, Canada, Sweden and Belgium, far from my home in Athens, Greece. Though always within urban environments of Western European culture, these years have cultivated a psychogeographic sensibility and an ease with rhizomatic thinking – modes of navigating the world that now inform how I make, write and teach.

This work sustains my ongoing commitment in generating discourse for and with craft within a sociopolitical framework, just as in my own artistic practice so far.

This commitment now manifests with slow care, where I develop a continuous, subjective system of references – one that blends entries from diverse domains and genres. As I navigate through these materials, I trace parallels and contradictions, allowing them to evolve and interact. Through this process, I jam fragments of critical theory, literature, poetry and personal commentary – annotated and interwoven with elements of fiction – to write from within the sociopolitical context where a dialectical image might emerge. It is within this space of balance, tension and resonance that I seek connections, synthesizing fragments to reveal unexpected affinities across time, disciplines and geographies. Jewellery, after all, exists in a space of in-betweenness; likewise, I apply now jewellery as a thinking method to write ‘between the lines’ – opening spaces for awareness and inviting interpretations beyond my control, same as jewellery often does as well.

Following the Flickering Lights is an evolving inquiry, where outcomes are shared in fragmented writings, a published article and a video essay. Each format offers distinct insights, feeding back into the research in a reciprocal loop. It is an investigation towards understanding the capacities of language, craft and education – navigated through the flickering lights of intuition, theory, memory and material engagement.