Galateia Kefalas is a queer, Greek artist who lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She completed her Bachelor of Visual Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design (ECUAD) in 2025 and has a background in Philosophy. Although her work spans many mediums, her practice focuses on the ability of artmaking and roleplaying in helping us imagine and manifest queer futures. Focusing on ceramics, Galateia uses the vessel as a mode of cultural communication and preservation while exploring immersive installation as a conduit for play, exploration, and worldbuilding. She has exhibited at several exhibitions in B.C., and she has participated in residencies in Western Canada. Galateia is now pursuing her MFA at the University of Manitoba where she continues to explore ideas of worldbuilding, collaborative storytelling, and material culture.
Artist Statement
Growing up in a conservative Greek household, queerness never felt like a possibility. Unable to describe how I felt as a young trans woman, games and fantasy gave me the opportunity to experience potentials I couldn’t imagine at the time. Now, in a world where queer futures feel increasingly less possible, I explore how artmaking and roleplaying can help us imagine and embody brighter, queerer futures.
In the past, my work solely focused on singular objects and their ability to communicate these narratives; however, my current work has moved into installation and performance. Using Dungeons and Dragons as a conduit for utopian world building, I’ve created the transnormative mythical world of Stamvathes (a portmanteau of the ‘stamen,’ and the Greek word for ‘clam’) for my friends and I to explore and investigate what a queer future might look like. We talk to locals, learn about their culture, and engage in collaborative storytelling, immersing ourselves into spaces where we can experience queer potentials and utopias.
I then channel these experiences into multi-media installations and create tableaus of our time in Stamvathes. Although these installations include a variety of materials, my focus is generally on ceramics. I am fascinated by the vessels’ ability to tell a story: who used this? What’s that on the surface? Why was this image worth putting on something so permanent? Drawing on concepts regarding material culture and my own heritage, I use and subvert Ancient Greek vessels to create forms that feel real and fantastic. At first familiar, these traditional vessels are interrupted with, peculiar handles, odd lobbing, and queer imagery, asking the audience to investigate further. Surrounding these ornate objects are the seemingly disparate mementos of the players, remnants of our collaboration within the game space. Combined, these installations recreate our time in the Stamvathes as we manifest potential queer utopias into our world and blur the line between reality and fiction. As audiences become immersed into these spaces and try to interpret these odd, perhaps confusing, narratives, I hope my work raises questions regarding the real and the fictional, the concrete and the potential, and what we privilege as possible.
Galateia Kefalas: Artist Portfolio 