Prologue
This Critical Review should be read alongside the body of work and experimentation documented throughout this unit. The two have developed together. One records the process of making, while the other reflects on the experiences, influences and research that have gradually shaped that process.
My work has not developed in isolation. It has grown through looking, reading, travelling, photographing, writing, making, remembering and meeting other people. Some influences, particularly Homer and C.P. Cavafy, have remained with me for many years. Others entered my practice at particular moments and helped me understand something I was already trying to express.
During this unit I have worked across photography, poetry, storytelling, moving image, music, digital experimentation and visual poetry. At times this process may appear broad or even messy, but I have gradually understood that these different forms are not separate from each other. They are different ways through which I try to make sense of movement, memory, language, belonging and uncertainty.
This review is therefore not intended to explain every piece of work or provide a final interpretation. It is an attempt to understand how my practice arrived at its present position, what has changed during the process, and which questions I want to carry with me into the final stage of the project.
It remains a draft, presented at this stage for formative feedback before the development of my final work and presentation.
Between Ithaca and the Unknown: Mythology, Movement and Open Interpretation in My Creative Practice
Introduction
My creative practice has increasingly developed around movement, memory, mythology and language. These subjects did not begin as an academic decision. They grew naturally from my own life and from the different places, people and cultures I have encountered.
I was born in Greece, but during my life I have lived and worked in different countries. England became home, while professional work took me through Italy, China, the Isle of Man and Scotland. China became particularly important because I did not simply visit it. I lived and worked there for long periods, travelled through different cities, photographed what I encountered and formed friendships. Some of these relationships later entered my creative work in transformed ways. My friend Gianmarco, for example, became connected in my imagination with Aeolus, the keeper of the winds in The Odyssey.
These experiences were not always easy. Travel can contain discovery, friendship and excitement, but also isolation, uncertainty and separation. I do not want my work to become an autobiography explaining exactly what happened to me. However, I also cannot pretend that these experiences are separate from the person making the work.
During this unit I have begun to understand the difference between using my life as a story and allowing lived experience to become material. A photograph can move away from the place where it was taken. A memory can become a poem. A person can become a mythological figure. Music from Greece can coexist with photographs from China or Scotland. Language can stop explaining and begin to form an image.
This Critical Review considers how mythology, travel, photography, poetry and multilingual language have helped me transform experience rather than simply describe it. It also considers an important change in my practice: from wanting to explain meaning towards allowing the viewer more space to find their own interpretation.
Homer, Cavafy and the journey
Homer’s Odyssey has remained one of the strongest influences on my practice. I think part of the reason is cultural. As a Greek person these stories were never completely distant from me. But as my own life became increasingly connected with movement between countries, Homer began to feel relevant in another way.
The Odyssey is about returning home, but very little of the poem is actually about being at home. Its meaning is created through interruption: islands, storms, strangers, temptation, loss, friendship and survival. Odysseus knows that Ithaca exists, but he cannot control the route that will take him there (Homer, 1996).
In earlier work I used Homeric figures and episodes more directly. Works such as Land of the Lotus Eaters, None, Leucothea and Aeolus allowed me to connect contemporary experience with ancient mythology. At that stage I found it useful because mythology gave me another language through which I could speak about experiences that were difficult to approach directly.
However, I gradually recognised a problem. If Odysseus always represented me, if Aeolus represented a particular person, or if every island corresponded to a particular place in my life, the work became a code waiting to be decoded. The viewer’s task could become simply discovering what each symbol represented.
I no longer find that enough.
C.P. Cavafy’s Ithaka has helped me think differently about the relationship between journey and destination. The poem suggests that Ithaka matters because it gives the traveller a reason to begin, but the knowledge and experience gathered during the journey become the real richness of travelling (Cavafy, 1975).
This connects strongly with my own experience. When I look backwards, the places I have travelled through cannot be reduced to whether they were successful or unsuccessful destinations. China, Italy, the Isle of Man and Scotland gave me experiences, images, friendships, difficulties and memories that continue to exist after I have left those places.
I increasingly see my practice in a similar way. I do not always know where a piece of work is going when I begin. An image can lead to a poem; a poem can lead to research; research can return me to an old photograph; that photograph can then produce another piece of work. The process itself becomes a journey.
This has influenced Storm. The traveller in Storm has no name. We do not know where they came from and we do not know where they will arrive. Ithaca is mentioned, but it is only one possibility. The storm may carry the traveller home, towards another harbour, somewhere completely unexpected, or nowhere.
This uncertainty feels important to me. Life does not always follow the structure of a story in which difficulty is followed by learning and finally by a successful return. Sometimes we simply do not know.
The traveller therefore says: “I don’t know. I just endure.”
For me this is where Homer remains present but has changed. I am no longer trying to recreate The Odyssey. I am using the idea of the journey as a structure within which uncertainty can exist.
Travel, photography and memory
Photography has become increasingly important within my practice because it allows me to collect moments while moving.
Yi-Fu Tuan’s discussion of space and place has helped me think about this relationship. He connects place with security and attachment and space with freedom and possibility (Tuan, 1977). I am interested in the fact that these conditions can also reverse. A place that gives security may eventually feel restrictive. An unfamiliar space may be frightening but may also offer possibility.
The bird sculpture I photographed on Holy Island became important for this reason.
When I first encountered it, I simply photographed something that attracted my attention. The meaning came later. The bird stands high on a post overlooking an enormous landscape. The post gives it height and allows it to see, but the same post prevents it from flying.
I began to see support and restriction existing inside the same object.
My first response was to explain this symbol quite directly. Later I experimented by removing the bird, showing it in flight and eventually leaving the empty support behind. The empty post became more interesting because it allowed the viewer to imagine what had happened. I also experimented with words, initially using them like captions and later moving them into the visual space itself.
This process taught me something important. I do not always need to explain everything I discover.
The same development happened through my photographic films. I used photographs I had taken myself in China, the Isle of Man, Scotland and England. Initially I wondered whether images from completely different countries and times could exist together. Once I began editing them with music, I realised that I was not making a travel documentary.
Memory does not organise itself geographically.
A photograph from China can sit beside an image from Scotland because something emotional connects them. Birds, water, reflections, horizons, architecture and solitary figures began to repeat without me deliberately planning them. Looking back through my photographs allowed me to recognise a visual vocabulary that I had already been creating without knowing it.
The films using Nikos Xylouris and later Sotiria Bellou became important experiments. Greek music was placed beside images made elsewhere. I did not want the photographs simply to illustrate the lyrics. Instead, music and photography could carry separate memories and meet emotionally.
This made me ask whether emotion can travel when language does not.
A viewer who does not speak Greek will experience Bellou’s voice differently from me. They do not carry my memories of Greece or understand every word. Yet rhythm, tone, silence, photographs and atmosphere may still communicate something.
This question became an important bridge towards my later interest in multilingual visual poetry.
From storytelling towards visual poetry
Storytelling has always been natural to me. The Bird and the Seal demonstrates this clearly. I created characters, dialogue, encounters and a journey through which ideas about hardship, friendship, language and survival could be explored.
I still value this work because it revealed something about the way I think. I often understand ideas by turning them into stories.
At the same time, I can now see its limitation. The story often tells the reader what to understand. The seal explains hope, hardship and companionship. The bird reaches another land and continues its journey. Meaning becomes relatively clear.
My later experiments started questioning that certainty.
During earlier studies I researched ways in which language could become visual material rather than remain separate from the image. George Herbert’s Easter Wings is an early example of shaped poetry, where the physical arrangement of words contributes to the experience of the poem (Herbert, 1633). The reader does not only read the poem; they also see its form.
Cy Twombly became interesting to me for a different reason. In works such as Poems to the Sea, writing, marks and open space exist together without behaving like ordinary illustration. Words and marks become part of the same visual field (Varnedoe, 1994).
These references returned to me while developing Storm.
Storm began as a mental picture: an unnamed person on an imperfect handmade raft in an enormous sea. Wind comes horizontally, rain vertically and the sea rises from underneath. There is nowhere to hide. Almost everything has disappeared and only the mast remains.
Initially I wrote the poem without wanting to make a conventional illustration. I wanted the reader to construct the storm in their own imagination.
Then another possibility appeared: what if the words themselves became the storm?
The wind could be made from horizontal language. Rain could fall as words. The sea could rise through text. The mast and raft could also be constructed through language. Instead of writing a poem and then illustrating it, the distinction between poem and image could begin to disappear.
For me, this feels like an important development because photography, poetry and visual making are beginning to work together rather than exist as separate activities.
Language, culture and translation
Multilingualism developed naturally from this experiment.
Languages are connected to different parts of my life. Greek is my first language. English has become the language in which much of my daily, professional and academic life takes place. Through travelling, working and curiosity, other languages including Chinese, Italian, German and Japanese have also entered my experience in different ways.
I carry fragments of these languages with me.
When I began thinking about putting several languages into Storm, I did not want to translate the same sentence six times. That would turn the work into a language exercise. I became more interested in what happens when languages perform different visual functions.
Chinese characters, Greek letters and Latin alphabets do not occupy visual space in the same way. Even when I cannot fully understand a language, I can experience its rhythm, sound, density and form.
Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani’s work with multilingual poetry became particularly relevant here. Her Reveries about Language brings English, French and Croatian into relationships with spoken sound, photography, animation and performance. She also describes audience members responding emotionally and musically to languages they did not understand (Bolfek-Radovani, 2021).
This gave me confidence in something I had already begun to feel through my own films: not understanding every word does not necessarily mean that communication has failed.
In fact, partial understanding may become part of the work.
This connects directly with travel. When entering another culture, complete understanding is rarely available. We recognise something and misunderstand something else. We listen, observe and gradually construct meaning. Language can make us feel both connected and outside.
In Storm, I want that uncertainty to remain.
This is also why I am becoming interested in translation beyond language. Translation can happen when a photograph becomes a poem, when memory becomes mythology, when music changes the emotional meaning of an image, or when an internal idea becomes a digital image.
My use of AI during the Storm experiments raised the same question. I began with an image inside my mind but lacked some of the digital illustration skills needed to make it directly. To use AI I had to translate the mental image into language. The system then produced its own interpretation, which I accepted, rejected or changed.
The process was not neutral. Something was always altered between thought, description and image.
Rather than hiding this, I think the differences and unsuccessful attempts are useful evidence. They return me to one of the central questions emerging from my practice:
What survives when something is translated or transformed?
Allowing the viewer into the work
One of the most important changes during this unit has been my relationship with the audience.
Earlier I often wanted to make sure the viewer understood what I meant. I explained symbols because they came from experiences that mattered deeply to me. But the more I explained, the less room remained for another person.
Umberto Eco’s idea of the “open work” has helped me understand this problem. Eco describes openness as allowing the audience an active role in interpretation rather than reducing a work to one fixed reading (Eco, 1989).
This does not mean that anything can mean anything. I still make decisions. I choose the raft, the mast, the languages, the photographs, the music and the structure. But I do not need to decide exactly what the storm represents for everybody.
For one viewer it may suggest migration. For another it may be grief, work, illness, loneliness, ageing, political uncertainty or simply survival. Someone else may see something completely different.
My personal experience can remain underneath the work without becoming the only key to understanding it.
This is perhaps the biggest difference between The Bird and the Seal and Storm. The bird tells a story and eventually finds another land. Storm refuses to tell us what happens.
I find that uncertainty more difficult, but also more interesting.
Reflection and direction
Looking across the work from this unit, I can now see that what initially appeared to be many different interests is becoming one connected practice.
I use photography because I observe while travelling. I use poetry because sometimes an image produces words rather than another image. I use storytelling because narrative is one of the ways I naturally think. I use moving image because photographs can create rhythm and emotional relationships when placed beside sound. I use mythology because ancient stories allow contemporary experience to be transformed rather than simply reported. I use different languages because different cultures and languages have become part of the way I experience the world.
These are not separate versions of me.
They are layers of the same practice.
The work is still developing and sometimes it is messy. I no longer see that entirely as a weakness. What matters is whether experimentation leads somewhere and whether I can recognise when an idea needs to be developed, changed or abandoned.
The Holy Island bird taught me that an ordinary photograph can continue developing long after it is taken. The visual poems taught me that photographs from different countries can become connected through memory rather than geography. Bellou and Xylouris helped me understand that sound and image do not have to explain each other. My multilingual experiments showed me that incomplete understanding can itself have meaning. Storm has brought these discoveries together while also creating new questions.
I also recognise something more personal through this process. Making art gives me a form of expression that I did not always have through my professional life. My background is technical and practical, but my creative practice allows another side of me to exist: curious, emotional, imaginative and willing to move between photography, poetry, storytelling, sound and image.
I do not want to force these different parts into one medium simply to make my practice appear more consistent. I would rather understand what connects them.
At the moment, I believe that connection is movement and transformation.
A person moves between countries. A photograph moves from documentation into memory. A real friend becomes Aeolus. An ancient myth enters contemporary experience. Greek music meets photographs from China and Scotland. A poem becomes an image. One language meets another without complete translation. A traveller holds onto a mast without knowing where the storm will take them.
Something changes each time.
Something also remains.
Perhaps this is what I now want to explore further. My task for the final stage is not to add more references simply to demonstrate research. It is to continue making, testing and removing until I understand which elements are necessary.
I began this unit thinking largely about journeys.
I finish this stage less certain about destinations.
That uncertainty no longer feels like a problem that needs to be solved. It may be where the work needs to remain: somewhere between Ithaca and the unknown.
References
Bolfek-Radovani, J. (2021) ‘“Reveries about language”: challenges and opportunities of performing multilingual poetry’, talk given at the Languages Future online conference, 15 April 2021. Available at: Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani website.
Cavafy, C.P. (1975) Collected Poems. Translated by E. Keeley and P. Sherrard; edited by G. Savidis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Eco, U. (1989) The Open Work. Translated by A. Cancogni. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Herbert, G. (1633) ‘Easter Wings’, in The Temple.
Homer (1996) The Odyssey. Translated by R. Fagles. New York: Viking.
Tuan, Y-F. (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Varnedoe, K. (1994) Cy Twombly: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
