Dimitra Dede, Mayflies, 2021

After the loss of her mother, the artist experiences the interruption of her own timeline on one end while having to fulfill her own role as a mother to the other end. In that end, motherhood in Dede’s universe is not connected only to warmth or joy but to cold, ice surfaces that need to stand the pressure of an overheated world. ‘Mayflies’ dramatises the creative process of mourning. Through multiple chirographic mutations of the imagery, the experience of loss in intertwined layers is represented throughout the work. Faces and bodies lingering in the shadows between conscious and subconscious in an attempt to let themselves be inert as Marcel Proust advice:

“When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power… that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”