The Center will not Hold

Strouza’s sculptural map is a contemporary shrine to the female goddesses originating in her native Greece and beyond. It is constructed of irregular pieces resembling baetyls, the shapeless stones that were often objects of cult worship in ancient Middle East.  Strouza creates her abstract work by first drawing shapes and patterns onto paper. She creates a mould by transferring the design onto a thin piece of clay and etching the patterns onto its surface. This shape is cast in plaster so that the design appears in relief and Strouza then fills the background areas with liquid plastic. Once they have set she arranges the composite pieces on the wall, a process that resembles the careful ordering of excavated fragments on an archaeological site.

Strouza’s spiral pattern represents the mythical wandering of Zeus’s lover, the goddess Leto, across the islands and coastline of the Aegean Sea.  At the centre of the spiral lies the island of Delos where Zeus, her lover, had arranged for Leto to find refuge so she could give birth to the twins Apollo, god of light and Artemis, goddess of the hunt, safe from the wrath of Zeus’s wife Hera.

The lined design inscribed on the individual pieces refers to the journey of another goddess, Isis, whose cult as the protector of seafarers expanded from Egypt to the Mediterranean during Greco-Roman times due to the arrival of travelling merchants.  Strouza sourced the image of Isis from a fragment found on Delos dating to the 2nd century AD showing her standing mast-like, on the prow of a ship, holding a “himation”—a cloak or wrap—as if it were a sail.

For Strouza Isis’s travels represent just one of the many networks of exchange and trade that have criss-crossed the world for centuries.

—Elina Kountouri, Director of NEON Organization