Art wrapped up

Eugenia Raskopoulos' latest addition to her series, 'Vestiges', takes the mundane and turns it into monumental art


Sometimes it’s easier to figure out what you don’t like rather than what you do, and for multi-faceted artist Eugenia Raskopoulos, there was a defining moment in art school that proved that point.

“I dread to say it, I started off in ceramics, and that was supposed to be my major in Sydney College,” she tells Neos Kosmos.

“In ceramics we had to do this project called Australiana, so people were making meat pies and kangaroos and tomato bottles in clay and I just couldn’t stand it.
“I was doing photography as an elective, and developing my first photograph was sheer magic. I was so wide eyed and it was such a buzz that I immediately said, right, I don’t want to be doing ceramics.”

From then on, photography hasn’t been the only medium in her repertoire. Entering a Eugenia Raskopoulos exhibition is like stepping into a new world, filled with unique and jaw-dropping installations, intriguing videos and sounds.

It’s sensory overload in the best possible way.

Her new exhibition, ‘Vestiges’, is a continuation of the first Vestiges project in 2010 where Eugenia collected all the intricate wrapping paper from her birthday presents that year and photographed them.

The inspiration hit when some of the wrapping paper mixed together in the back of her car.

“I opened the car up and there were these two wrappings … that sat side by side, it was just one of those triggers that I thought, oh these would be interesting to play with,” she says.

“And that’s exactly what I did.”

The artwork in ‘Vestiges’ keeps doubling each year as Eugenia documents her birthdays. Her new additions will be exhibited for the first time in Melbourne.
The work plays with texture and light, with shadows forming from the creases, with multiple materials protruding through. There’s even a little bit of sticky tape that peaks out in one of them.

The photographs of these new structures feel like they jump out at you, begging to be noticed, effectively giving these sad pieces of paper a new lease on life.

It must be a challenge for Eugenia’s friends when they’re going out to buy a present for her. There’s a whole lot of pressure to make the wrapping paper as interesting as the present itself.

The work is as beautiful as it is abstract and the theme of keeping and reusing things is something close to Eugenia’s heart.
“It stems back to me as a migrant child, you use and reuse everything,” she says with a laugh.
“It’s this social transaction that occurs, that you’re given something that is quite pristine and immaculate, and the performance on it on ripping it apart, damaging it and photographing that.

“Something that can be meaningless becomes monumental.”

There are small imprints of what was once concealed in the paper, bringing back memories of the thrill of opening a present.
As the exhibition is ongoing, Eugenia has received a lot of acclaim for ‘Vestiges’ and took out the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award in 2012 for Vestiges #3.

The award came with a $20,000 cheque that has helped the series continue.

It’s just one of the countless awards and grants Eugenia has to her name that has helped her work become internationally renowned and loved.
Her collections are housed not just in some of Australia’s best museums, but in the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece, in the Bodo University of Norway, the Malmo University in Sweden and the Groningen Hochschule University in The Netherlands.

Her artwork has become collector’s items for many in the USA, China, and Switzerland, just to name a few.

Her work never suffers from the idea of having to create something for mass appeal. The idea of a successful exhibition for Eugenia isn’t just about selling pieces of art, it’s about accurately executing her ideas into art.

“I’d be disappointed to think success is only from something that sells,” she says.

“My installations aren’t something you can just pick up and put in your loungeroom, maybe the odd institution perhaps but it’s limited.”

Her installations use space expertly and make for an striking first impression.

Last year her exhibition, ‘Read your lips’ used a very long silver ladder suspended in space to portray a ‘temporary unbalance’ or ‘discomfort’.
The show was all about language and identity, themes that Eugenia’s work has become synonymous for.

Visitors had a big part to play in the exhibition, with their own lips projected after being recognised by facial recognition software – a computer randomly selected a language from a database and counted each pair of lips captured throughout the exhibition.

“The visitor unwittingly becomes the performer of their own unsolicited surveillance,” Eugenia explained.

The themes of identity and language is something Eugenia has worked with her whole life and largely comes from the split identity she faced when arriving in Australia with her parents.

She was just four years old when her parents made it to the shores of Sydney. Her parents were well travelled before the move, living in the Czech Republic, Albania, Romania and Greece and taking the word migrant to the extremes for the early part of their lives.

“They didn’t really come out from a small village from Greece, they’d seen other worlds,” she says.

“I see this as fortunate because they knew what it meant to be the other.”

One of her first exhibitions touched on her own identity struggle of growing up Greek in Australia.

“I did a work early on called ‘Social Gardens’ and I looked at people’s front laws in caravan parks.

“If I think about my parents’ garden, I wanted to be so similar to everybody else, I wish we had manicured laws and roses, compared to tomatoes.”

Her Greek ancestry also makes an impact in her exhibitions with the use of language. You’ll find lots of Greek characters mixed in with hundreds of other foreign letters hidden in her work.

“These are issues artists deal with all over the world, other languages, translation, it’s a universal theme,” she says.

Eugenia Raskopoulos will be exhibiting ‘Vestiges’ at Arc One Gallery, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne from May 13 till June 14. For more information, visit arcone.com.au/ and eugeniaraskopoulos.com/