Endings, Beginings and Regret
Project details
- Year
- 2024
- Programme
- Bachelor – Illustration
- Practices
- Social Practices
- Minor
- Powerplay
Endings, Beginnings and Regret is a project where, through exploring the concept of regret, I find my values and needs. With this piece, I satirize the painful experience of transitioning from education to career while living in instability. I created a path to follow once I graduate in tattoos but did I experiment enogh to feel confident that this is the right choice for me?
Anticipating future career regrets, I experiment with porcelain: the last material I regret not having experimented with during my time at Willem de Kooning Academy.
I learn about anticipated regret and the way regret is affected by environment. Stuck in an existence of constant need to express creatively and subsequent comparison of self (as creator) and others (as creators), an artist is doomed to face regret.
Continuiong to look for the motivation of my fear of regret I come to my values and needs, which are dictated by my family’s socio-economic status. Being Ukrainian and Cypriot, refugeenes and migration are part of our lives. The invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and the invasion of Ukrain in 2013 and 2022 put me in a position of seeing half of my family become regugees while being raised by earlier-refuges. I feel like I should be focusing on financial gain, artistic experimintation higher eucation and career in art seem pointless. This project is my way of dealing with these thoughts and the regret they bring. My conclusion is that tattoos is the right choice, I have no power over my situation but I do have the power to put myself in a position that allows me to stay creative and have stability. For me that position is tattoos.
You can find my research paper here: https://graduation.catalogue.wdka.nl/2024-aliki-papafotiou/wp-content/uploads/sites/1551/2024/06/Aliki-Papafotiou-1009969-Endings-beginnings-and-regret-small.pdf
I imagine regret as a multi-headed demon like the Learnean Hydra, if one head is cut off two more grow in its place. The same way if regret is blindly denied it multiplies. Heracles had to face Hydra to learn that the heads would stop growing only when fire was used to seal the wounds. I face my regret spending time understanding what it is and why I feel it. I create a total of 29 porcelain baby heads. All of them are illustrated, each baby has a number on the back of their neck explaining the illustration.
01 I was subconsciously satirizing the idea of regret with a sad clown.
02 Lettering tattoo baby, after concluding that tattoos are the right path for me.
03 Homage to Malevich, the face shows “Suprematist Compo sition (with eight red rectangles)” and the back shows “The Black Supermatist Square”.
04 Homage to “Self” by Quinn
05 Homage to “The Black Suprematist Square”
06 Smaller iteration of Big Baby
07 Inspired by Chicano tattoos, it shows characteristic designs like the sugar skull, “Mi Vida Loca” and a sacred heart.
08 This baby was me discovering the similarity in porcelain and tattoos. Blue and white porcelain was my initial concept for this work, by looking at more examples I realized the themes of flowers and dragons are the same as in Asian tattoos.
09 In the process of repeating clowns (made after baby 13) I created a payaso, another Chicano design with some filigree on the sides.
10 Glass jars drying on the fence of my grandma’s summer house.
11 “Drowning in regret”.
12 Ruins of a city.
13 Repetition of baby no.01. Repetition is big part of tattooing so I apply that idea to porcelain.
14 Agia Maria (Holly Mary), counterpart to no.16 Baby Jesus.
15 Lernean Hydra design from a 6th century BCE pottery showing Hydra, Heracles and lolaos.
16 Baby Jesus in Byzantine Iconography style. Cyprus, is a very religious country were Orthodoxism shaped our culture in many ways, being brought up in that environment informs the way I see regret.
17 Sakura, repetition of blue and white pottery, I chose sakura flowers because they’re a prominent motif in Japanese tattoos.
18 Classic doll but in blue and white pottery, after making some very conceptual decorations wanted to contrast them with something simple.
19 Traditional tattoo edition of Lernean Hydra
20 Flamoudi or Mersinlik, this baby shows my dad’s original home. I chose to depict everything blurry because I never got to live there, my recollections are from the countless stories I heard from our family and friends and the two times I was able to visit.
21 Bitcoin baby talks about financial regret, I chose specifically bitcoin because it always reminds me of alleged suicides that happened over bitcoin crashes. Casually seeing suicide prevention numbers on reddit is in my opinion a reflection of modern life.
22 In 2022 the biggest recorded fire at the time in Cyprus happened in Mersinlik/Flamoudi measuring over 50 km2. The cause was never confirmed but it’s likely negligence. When the Cypriot Republic offered help, the South refused even though the fire was unmanageable and only ended from rainfall.
23 Classic baby came to be as a repetition of no.18
24 Abortion baby for those who regret having one, counterpart of baby no.27.
25 Continuing my blue and white porcelain explorations and repetitions this iteration combines satire and fascination.
26 Studenok baby shows the summer house I spent my summers until 2013. The datcha was bombed in 2022, nothing remains of our home anymore. This house was the only stable home I had, we always moved around both when we lived in Ukraine and Cyprus.
27 Storks on this baby symbolize regret of having children, a topic that shows up often when I researched regret studies.
28 Shows four fish-shaped shot glasses, the Fish Decanter Porcelain Set is an iconic Soviet design manufactured at Polonne ZHK factory in the 70’s, it includes a big fish-shaped decanter and six small fish-shaped shot glasses traditionally used for Vodka or Samogon (home-made vodka).