ART CITIES:Athens-Vasiliki Lefkaditi

While historically viewed as a pastime, activity intended just for women, embroidery has often been used as a form of biography. Women who were unable to access a formal education, were often taught embroidery and utilized it as a means of documenting their lives. First, as a direct answer to the Industrial Revolution created by the 19th century Arts and Crafts Movement (1880-1920) emerged in England and then spread all over the Western world.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Vasiliki Lefkaditi Archive

In the male-dominated art world, a hierarchy of the arts developed and was maintained by a common opinion that textile and fiber work were decorative forms and less intellectually involved and serve only domestic and aesthetic needs. The 1960’s was a time of pioneer feminist artists like Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro, Patsy Novell, Janine Antoni and many others, who encouraged and celebrated the traditional crafts in all their forms, and paved their way towards the world of art through alternative spaces like “Womanhouse” and installation exhibitions like “The Dinner Party”. Influenced by postmodernist ideas, textile and fiber work has become more and more conceptual. Various creatives are now experimenting with techniques, materials and concepts, completely pushing the limits of the medium. These re-born practices such as embroidery art, weaving, quilting, crochet and many others, have placed a new focus on the work that confronted social and political issues such as gender feminism, domesticity, women’s work, identity politics and proved a weapon of resistance to the painful constraints of femininity. Vasiliki Lefkaditi in her solo exhibition “Weaving through life with a scarlet thread: 1985-3995”, presents a series of works using red thread on broad cloth. The artist creates stories that at first sight may look familiar, but in reality, are timeless. In her work Lefkaditi using exclusively at first Butterfly yarn no 1985 and then 3995, as the title of the exhibition reveals, creates unique artworks transforming her own worries, sarcastic and caustic comments, obsessions, dreams and desires. In the series of the works that Lefkaditi shows, she permeates throughout women history, adopting different roles each time, all but relating to a blood bond, for example as the mother and housewife in the series of recipes, inspired from a recipe book written in 1957 at Chios Island from an unknown woman founded on the web. The artist reveals her history which ends to a Postmodern Eve, on the occasion and starting point of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving “Adam and Eve” (1504), which consciously chooses to present unfinished to demonstrate the multiple readings, of a well-known artwork.

Photo: Vasiliki Lefkaditi, Dürer (detail), 260x330cm, Red thread on broad cloth, © & Courtesy the artist

Info: Curator: Efi Michalarou, Gallery 7, Solonos 20 str, Athens, Duration: 20/4-15/5/2021, Days & Hours: Wed & Sat 11:00-15:00, Tue & Thu-Fri 11:00-14:00 & 18:00-21:00, www.gallery7.gr