Eco Art Exhibition Comes to Geroskipou

The series Eco Art features site-specific artworks that refer to the environment. The 2019 group exhibition entitled ‘Public Nature-Private Culture’ asks viewers to contemplate the interplay between natural geology, flora, and fauna and markers of human cultural expression. The site chosen is intriguing: a stone escarpment reveals caves and openings carved by man and occupied in various ways over the centuries. In the past, for example, some were used as burial chambers, while currently Christians have decorated the walls with icons for devotional purposes. Now artists invite you to look anew at the site as you view eight works along a labelled pathway. The first work, ‘Ephemeral Culture’, is a pallet of cat food bricks offered to the current residents—the cats. In ‘Tama and the Rose’, Miriam McConnon creates a lacy pattern out of rose-shaped linens on the floor of a shrine. Susan Vargas’s ‘Tablets’ is interactive: you are invited to inscribe your messages on seven wax tablets, paralleling the process by which Christian believers have made their devotional wishes public. The totemic wishing tree by Tim Bennett, ‘Wish Harder’, stands outside the chambers and uses manufactured materials (steel, paint, hula hoops) to create a biomorphic form. Rinos Stefani’s ‘Saint George and the Dragon’ features a large log resting on an abandoned building foundation and pierced by sawblades; it symbolises the Anthropocene, the era in earth’s history in which man came to dominate nature. ‘Public Nature-Private Culture’ is located next to St. George’s chapel. The exhibition continues through 31 December.