Contemporary Archaeologies

This exhibition came out of an initiative started by Grace Pappas, my former student at the Royal College of Art, called the Expanded Museum, which brought together practitioners engaged in critical museology, addressing (through making) issues such as decolonialisation, inclusion and new forms of display. I helped organise Contemporary Archaeologies as a follow-up residency programme in Athens, and participated as an artist. The theme came from my interest in using archaeological methods in combination with architectural methods to investigate our current ontologies. The final exhibition was co-curated by the artists: Ana Helena Arévalo, Susan Atwill, Marika Jasmine Grasso, Milo O'Halloran, Stella Papaioannou, Dooyong Ro, Pappas and myself.

I produced a body of work including a drawing mounted on a lightbox, four large prints on fabric, and various digital works, all explicitly using these methods. All of these were explorations of surface, in this case of marble from the Parthenon. I developed the methodology by further subdividing archaeological, architectural and ontological methods into spatial scales of micro, meso and macro—the micro level being focused on material exploration, the meso at human scale, and the macro at sociocultural scale. I systematically tried to work at each spatial and temporal scale.