Lady Lazarus

About

Referencing the monstrous feminine archetype, Pouliassi’s new body of work spans themes of transformation, subjugation and the fetish as an emblem of triumph. Found objects, sculptures made of clothes, shoes, bones, hair and teeth pose as reformed beings with only purpose to to destabilise anthropocentrism and create a post-apocalyptic feminine vision

Pouliassi has continued in her unique ability to craft trauma and history, both personal and universal, creating objects that question the base meanings of human, femininity and the self. These new works find a teetering balance between the romantic and the grotesque, objects ever transforming, in flux with themselves as beings. Pouliassi uses this instability as a means to destabilise anthropocentrism and create a post-apocalyptic feminine vision. The feminine is undeniable within the works, a self starting point from which Pouliassi searches through myth to reinvent femininity, decoding the monstrous feminine archetype. In an essay for Granta, Hannah Williams explores the idea of ‘woman as terroriser’ that has been a narrative throughout history;

‘The female body has been codified as disgusting, defective- leaking, bleeding, oozing- from time immemorial. She limps, incomplete and half-finished, across Aristotle’s theories, a deformed ‘monstrosity’ and ‘misbegotten man’; stalks through Talmud on Lilith’s jackal-feet, flying through the night on her bird wings to sate her demon’s appetite; drags her heavy body through Greek mythology, crowned with curls of snakes. She’s simultaneously too-much and less-than; little more than an underdeveloped man, a foetus too weak to grow entirely, pale and fragile as an orchid.’ 

The pedestals of woman Pouliassi has created stand as monuments acting to subvert the narrative and empower the monstrous. She combines monstrosity and sensuality to form beings that attract and repel us simultaneously. Like the busts of old they offer a representation of self, however, under Pouliassi’s hand they are enabled to tell their own story. Her continued use of found materials embeds the objects with a past separate for her’s. A life created out of detritus fuels more careful balance, decay existing with regeneration. The use of found materials also echoes to the economy of traditional busts that used less material than full size sculptures and embodied less space as objects, in turn echoing the space that woman has taken up in the traditional narrative.

Irene Pouliassi traverses within the subjects of identity pain and contemporary societal tribalistic manifestations. Being raised between Athens and North Corfu where she originates from, reflections from the austere turbulence and the revolutionary zeitgeist form the red thread in her work creating a riotous essence combined with folk aesthetics. Sculpture, installation, video art, assemblages - Pouliassi’s artistic practice is diverse and transdisciplinary, building up to an allegorical social taxidermy. Using garments, household objects and biomaterial she revives the discarded, remolding neo-punk au courant fetishes.

In 2016 she got her Masters Integrated in painting from the Fine Arts Academy in the University of Western Macedonia and in 2018 she Graduated from Chelsea College of Arts with a Masters in Fine Arts. Her work has been shown at Charlie Smith London, D Contemporary London, Sejong Museum of Art in Seoul, National Historical Museum of Tirana,Jing Lu gallery in Taipei, Taiwan. In late 2019 Pouliassi presented her second solo exhibition ‘Ritalin Shots’ in Gallery Peritechnon Karteris which represents her in Greece. From 2021 Irene Pouliassi is a studio resident at Bomb Factory Foundation in London and from 2022 is a member of Royal Society of Sculptors.

Will Coups (b.1995) is a London based curator and gallerist. He studied at the University of Edinburgh and Chelsea College of Art where he gained an MA Fine Art in 2018. He has curated numerous exhibitions in various countries including Poland, Greece and the UK. In 2022 he founded Coups Contemporary in Fitzrovia, London, where he runs a programme of exhibitions by British and international emerging contemporary artists.