My name is Tonia Avdelopoulou and I am a painter and an art director. Hanging around my city I was appealed by the big advertising billboards made of laminated textile.
As a set designer, I‘ve used many times such material as the background on tv sets, exhibition stands or even in advertising campaigns. They usually have a company logotype and a topic concerning the product. When the advert or the exhibition completes they end up in the waste.
I collected some of them as they seemed interesting in terms of colour and design.
And I transform them.
With tenacity and toil I changed identity to this symbol of consumption which commonly disfigures my city and in my way make it look beautiful.
So the Hanging Gardens were born.
Towards the completion of the visual part I felt the need to integrate it with harmonies. So I used soundtracks from all over the word and different time periods so that the outcome is a hymn to love and optimism and recuperates romanticism.
The concept.....
Where Babylon Hanging gardens a dream?
Did the existed only in the mind and fantasy of Greek poets and history writers? Or where they invented by the soldiers of Alexander the great?
Discarding the feeling for the transcendence of nature, tarpaulins and laminated textiles became the raw material to my dreams.
Matter has memory, containing shapes and ideas.
My last artwork based on a material configuration, gives arbitrarily another identity into matter that was already identified.
My attempt is to turn “ugly” into “beauty” creating the aesthetic and factual contedment of an urban landscape-topic.
Useless trash for others, change ID and defiantly attain new scheme and dimensions to space.
My “Hanging gardens” are similar to brain neurones - endless corridors of blossoms and love.
I invite you to share my “Hanging Gardens”