I am a queer, Greek artist who was born and lives in the Lower
Mainland in BC. With great pleasure, I have now completed my Bachelors of Visual Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design
(ECUAD) and have a background in Philosophy (Associates of Philosophy Langara College
2015). My work has exhibited at the Shadbolt Art Gallery – Langara College Ceramics
Scholarship 2021, ArtRich 2021, ArtRich 2023, and several exhibits at Langara College and
ECUAD. I have also participated in residencies at the Shadbolt and Medalta.
I will be pursuing my MFA at the University of Manitoba in September where I will continue exploring ceramics, craft, material culture, and reparative artwork and play.
Artist Statement
As a child, I remember attending Greek Orthodox church services with my family and being mesmerized by the artwork within these opulent buildings. However, as I grew up, I came into my queerness and felt it hard it to embrace my transness and art within my culture. Feeling ostracized, I found solace in storytelling and video games, eventually leading me to embrace reparative play and artmaking. These concepts branch from queer-theorist Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading and ask us to reinterpret and investigate the world around us through play and artmaking. As we role-play and make artwork, we interrogate our lived experiences, explore them, and look toward more hopeful futures for our world. As a result, my work has become centered around storytelling, reparative play and artmaking, and material culture.
My work has become largely based upon a single story: “Goblina and the Magic Ribbon.” Using Dungeons and Dragons as a framework, I have begun writing the campaign, “Goblina and the Magic Ribbon,” to explore storytelling, transnormative worlds, and material culture. As my cohorts and I play through this campaign together, we explore the fictional transgender Goblin society of Stamvathes and learn about its people, history, rituals, and culture, and experience a world without hegemonic heteronormativity. We then actualize our experiences through object making, manifesting the material culture of Stamvathes and the marks we leave there as we create still-lives and interactive installations.
The material culture of this place is historically inspired as I draw upon forms from various cultures with a particular focus on ancient Greek ceramics. As a Greek transwoman, I have found my culture and its artwork both fascinating and demeaning as I see how transpeople have been ignored or erased historically and reviled through religion presently. Furthermore, ceramics itself is a fascinating medium through which to manifest a material culture: its ubiquity and ability to communicate narrative in a timeless, inerasable way make it perfect for telling the story of trans people who have been frequently missed, ignored, and erased in Western cultures.
The goal of my work is to inspire optimism and provide an avenue through which people can reimagine their own experiences in our increasingly divided world by role-playing and artmaking. I hope that my stories and their physical manifestation resonate with viewers, inspire them to creative their own reparative narratives, and question what we privilege as real and designate as fictional.
Galateia Kefalas: Artist Portfolio 