Critical Review Odyssey
Between Lands, Languages, and Different Media: The Bird Who Came From Afar — An Ongoing Odyssey.
Introduction
This Critical Review explores the conceptual and practical development of my Negotiated Project as part of Stage Two of my Creative Arts degree. Titled The Bird Who Came From Afar, the project represents an evolving body of work that sits at the intersection of poetry, performance, multilingual expression, and personal mythology. Rooted in the ancient Greek tradition and diasporic experience, my work investigates how language, cultural memory, and aesthetic form can merge across disciplines to construct a meaningful creative voice.
My practice began as a personal exploration of exile and creative identity but developed into an interdisciplinary dialogue between theory and poetic experimentation. The themes of Relation, Perspective, and Language emerged not only as abstract concepts but as embodied realities I experience daily as a Greek-born artist navigating work, family, and artistic identity in the UK.
This review contextualises my Negotiated Project in a wider cultural framework, connecting theory with practice, and showing how reflection, research, and experimentation have informed my creative process.
Conceptual Foundations: Eros, Pathos, and the Diasporic Voice
One of the starting points of my project was the philosophical and etymological exploration of Greek-origin words such as Eros, Catharsis, Nostalgia, and Aletheia. These words do not only carry linguistic meaning; they embody philosophical worldviews rooted in ancient drama, ritual, and myth.
For example, Catharsis (κάθαρσις) originates in Aristotle’s Poetics, describing the emotional purification experienced by audiences through tragedy (Aristotle, trans. 1987). Eros (Ἐρως), far beyond romantic love, is the binding force of the cosmos in Plato’s Symposium (Plato, trans. 2008). Similarly, Nostalgia derives from nostos (return home) and algos (pain), reflecting Odysseus’s longing for Ithaca.
This etymological and emotional richness became central to my poetic language. I created bilingual or hybrid poems using both English and Greek transliterations (“Greenglish”) to reflect the layered nature of identity and language in diasporic experience. These poetic forms are inspired by the likes of Cavafy, who bridged the modern and ancient, personal and historical, real and imagined (Matalas, 2015).
Myth and Metaphor: The Bird Who Came From Afar
The metaphor of “The Bird Who Came From Afar” emerged early in the unit and became a narrative thread throughout my project. Like Odysseus or the exiled figures of ancient drama, this bird embodies displacement, voice, and longing. It represents the artist as traveller: carrier of stories, dreams, and trauma.
This personal myth allowed me to create a visual and textual structure around which I could experiment with typography, image, and text placement. In the poem-sequence I developed, each stanza mirrors a wingbeat, a step on the journey. The bird is also a “word-bird,” singing in overlapping tongues, echoing my own linguistic dislocation.
Poetic Form and Experimentation
Inspired by concrete and visual poetry, I explored different formats: dual columns (English/Greek), staggered verses, and words written phonetically. I drew from artists such as Joe Brainard (I Remember, 1970), and contemporary visual poets using multilingual expression (Language is a Virus, 2023). I also used tools like superscript, typographic layering, and visual disruption to evoke fragmentation and resonance.
This experimentation was not purely aesthetic. It reflected my internal negotiation between cultural origins and present location. The visual form of my poems embodied tension, connection, or disjunction — mirroring the lived experience of cultural duality. I explored how different scripts (Greek/Latin) can co-exist, compete, or harmonise.
Research and Contextual Influences
My research included studying classical literature, contemporary poetics, and diaspora theory. I examined how artists from diasporic backgrounds (Greek-Australian, Arab-European, Asian-British) use their native languages and inherited stories to question identity and belonging.
A key influence was Homi Bhabha’s theory of the “third space,” which argues that hybrid cultural identity is not a fixed essence but an evolving negotiation (Bhabha, 1994). This resonated with my experience and opened space for a multilingual poetics that resists simplification.
Equally relevant was the work of Simon Willems, whose integration of theory and practice helped me think of painting and poetry as overlapping languages of thought. Willems’s blending of fiction, reflection, and material practice (OCA, 2023) mirrored my own approach to myth-making and poetic composition.
The Personal as Political: Creative Autobiography
My work sits within the tradition of creative autobiography, where the personal becomes the political. Like Cavafy or Seferis, I use personal stories as containers for collective themes: exile, masculinity, longing, and resilience.
My spoken pieces and written texts also reference the economic and emotional struggles of migration and precarity. The poetic voice often turns inward, but it does so to articulate a condition shared by many displaced workers and fathers like myself, trying to balance creative life with responsibility.
This is where the pathos of the bird comes in. It is not just an allegory. It is my lived truth.
Critical Reflection and Future Directions
This project helped me claim my voice as a multilingual, interdisciplinary artist. I no longer see theory and practice as separate. The poetic word, the typographic space, the sound of language — all become tools for critical inquiry.
Going forward, I want to develop this work into a performative artist book or audio-visual installation, where sound, image, and word interact. I also want to explore how the Greek diaspora can be represented not through nostalgia but through critical presence.
The bird who came from afar will continue to fly, land, and sing. But its song is now part of a larger chorus: of artists, migrants, thinkers, and poets navigating between lands and languages.
References
Aristotle (1987). Poetics (trans. Richard Janko). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Brainard, J. (1970). I Remember. New York: Angel Hair Books.
Language is a Virus. (2023). Creative Writing Techniques – Oulipo and Visual Tools. Available at: https://www.languageisavirus.com/ [Accessed 20 Sept. 2025].
Matalas, D. (2015). C.P. Cavafy and the Poetics of Exile. Athens: Kastaniotis.
Plato (2008). Symposium (trans. Robin Waterfield). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Open College of the Arts (2023). Case Study: Simon Willems. OCA Learn Platform. Available at: https://learn.oca.ac.uk/
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