Seascapes at Voices of Memory

Kalpaxi, Elisavet (2025) Seascapes at Voices of Memory. [Show/Exhibition]

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Abstract

Seascape 1 belongs to a whole range of sea-related work that I created in response to the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean Sea, and the thousands of people who lost their lives at sea in the last 20 years alone. The series ranges in mediums and forms; the common feature in these works is that they consist entirely of seascapes. The particular series that Seascape 1 belongs to consists of painted images on board using liquid photographic emulsion. Liquid photographic emulsion is a light-sensitive material, most typically employed to turn surfaces into material for photographic exposure and printing in the darkroom. In this case, it has been used as ink. Not all photographic images are realistic, and a few photographs exclude the possibility of a comparison; however, in this case, the work excludes the automatic attribution of the image to a scene outside representation, it also excludes the notion of instantaneously ‘capturing’ an image, as time has been suspended 22with the work being created through time. This means that the work is photographic in terms of its material qualities, but it does not fully operate as a photograph. This whole process was to complicate notions of indexicality, a feature that is often associated with photography’s nature, and Roland Barthes’ conception of photographic time, as ‘this has been’ (from Camera Lucida, 1981). It was also about finding ways of writing, recording, and engaging with a theme that deserves further elaboration. I only noticed how much faster the image fades than other photographic surfaces in 2020, when visible signs of deterioration marked the surface of the work. This image once was a seascape and no longer is, as if indexicality strives to win over the work’s forcefully attributed painterly and fictitious quality, with implications for memory and the events associated with the series: a sea of time washing away memories, of people, of non-ending war, of boats and travel, of exchange, and greed, and European Policy, and families, and children... A series of commissions led to more such works, which follow their own cycles of aging in the spaces they now occupy, and operate as markers of the passage of time and veil of memory.

Item Type:	Show/Exhibition
Depositing User:	Research and Knowledge Exchange Office Admin 1
Date Deposited:	14 May 2026 13:31
Last Modified:	14 May 2026 13:31
URI:	https://bnu.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/20986

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