This presentation features a new series of photographic works that reference the ritual of coffee reading and occult diagrammatic constellations. Overlaying photographic print onto photoluminescent paper, framed by hand-embossed metal, the works reveal and conceal themselves as the window lighting changes.
Much like the hauntings of an image hovering in the back of the eye’s retina, obfuscating our vision of what we actually see, the disparate yet interlinked symbolic visual and diagrammatic languages in Stefatou’s works open up a space where our own beliefs can start to take hold. Through her process of gathering and repositioning various forms of knowledge and knowledge sharing, Stefatou accumulates research from archival footage, interviews, collected objects, and location visits. Interested in the motifs of constellations and mapping, and how they are informed by lore, rituals, and contemporary narratives, this body of work overlays references to multiple disparate belief systems, from the religious to the occult to the scientific.
As the title Glow-in-the-dark Stars and Blu Tack hints at, the craft-based materiality of the works is left evident rather than concealed. Several works play with the materiality of embossed orthodox iconographic imagery produced from the 1980s onwards, often found decorating Greek Orthodox homes and made on cheaply pressed tin to mimic silver. Just as the grains of coffee are only imbued with deeper significance through the reader’s interpretations and the receiver’s choice to take or leave the signs, the artwork offers itself to be taken at face value or with the mystery imbued by its shifting image appearing from the dark like a floating wavering mirage.
Artist Biography
Anna-Rose Stefatou (b.1996, Athens) is a Greek-British artist based between Athens and London, working between moving image, installation, photography, and writing. Stefatou’s interdisciplinary works attend to stories attached to place and beginning to exist through writing, whether they become a structure to hold it, or whether language simply runs through them. Language is used both as an outset and as a distillation mechanism for ideas, with materials and imagery in visual works responding directly to the text. Gathering and repositioning knowledge guides her creative process: research includes archival footage, taking interviews, collecting objects, and location visits. This process is made visible through her material approach to the photographic image, transformed through different materials, forms and uses, as it unfolds and re-invents itself within new contexts. Stefatou graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019. Recently, she undertook a residency at Hospitalfield House, Scotland in 2023. Upcoming projects include an exhibition at Pharmakeion, Athens in 2025 as well as a publication Dregs, Beacons that will be realised in 2025.
Anna-Rose Stefatou: Glow-in-the-dark Stars and Blu Tack press release
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