PERSONAL FRAMEWORK
Name: Alexander Papanikolaou Student number 520104
Unit: Creative Arts – Personal Practice Development
Theme / Focus:
Personal Odyssey, Journey, Displacement, Identity, Fleeting Connection, Myth-Inspired Narratives
Mediums:
Photography, Poetry, Creative Writing
Working Title: The Bird That Came From Afar / Alex Owns Odyssey
Key Creative Concerns
- Translating internal migration through external landscapes
- Finding visual metaphors for impermanence and longing
- Mapping emotional memory through photography, handwritten marks, and symbolism
- Exploring myth as personal narrative (Greek + Chinese)
- Living in-between digital culture and tactile human experience
- Embracing the fragment as both poetic and documentary
Recurring Visual & Emotional Motifs
- Birds (freedom, distance, observation)
- Fish (depth, silence, emotional resonance)
- Storms (internal struggle / external change)
- Skies and oceans as parallel spaces
- Handwriting as intimate language
- Mythological symbolism and borrowed archetypes
Creative Influences & Literary Anchors
Homer – The Odyssey
A foundational mythic structure for personal transformation. The journey across seas, facing trials, gods, and exile, becomes a powerful mirror of emotional and creative migration. Each place visited becomes a metaphorical island in the emotional and artistic voyage.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Known for his raw, emotional layering of language and imagery. His mark-making, fragmented symbolism, and fusion of identity, heritage, and graffiti language echo my desire to collage myth and personal memory in an expressive way.
Nikos Kavadias
The Greek poet-sailor who turned displacement, longing, and port cities into lyrical cartographies. His poetic worlds (Marabou, Fog, Traverso) are full of missed connections, waves, and drifting. His work gave emotional resonance to my time in China, and taught me to treat distance as a poetic and creative space.
Stephen Fry
His vivid retelling of Greek mythology (Mythos, Heroes, Troy) opened new doors in my thinking about narrative structure and emotional archetype. I use his framework to map personal stories onto epic myths, giving timeless shape to my own dislocation and rebirth.
Andy Warhol
His approach to repetition, celebrity, image-culture, and detachment helped me reflect on China’s high-speed society and its digital façade. The way Warhol elevated the surface made me reconsider the depth of the visual fragment.
Banksy
With his anonymous yet bold social commentary, Banksy taught me how a simple visual moment, placed in the right public space, can carry intense emotional weight. His work inspires my use of poetic gesture and the power of an image; my intention is to combine photography with narrative.
Aesop’s Fables
Through animal personification and allegory, Aesop offered timeless truths about human nature. His ability to condense moral complexity into deceptively simple stories continues to inspire the animal-led metaphors in my work—especially the Bird, the Fish, and the Anemone. His fables remind me that storytelling can be universal, memorable, and deeply human, even when told through non-human voices.
Reference Note – Nikos Kavadias
Nikos Kavadias (1910–1975), a poet of the sea and exile, constructed a poetic universe centred on the idea of permanent departure. His works (Marabou, Fog, Traverso) are emotional logbooks, full of faded ports, lost lovers, and existential drift. While living in China, I returned to his writing as an anchor. His voice gave me permission to feel dislocated, to embrace emotional distance as a creative lens. My own imagery began echoing that salt-burned nostalgia. In my ongoing work, The Bird That Came From Afar, I created my own sailor’s myth—except this one flies.
Alexander's blog 