My current body of work, Thalassa, begins with literary sources but quickly moves to the crafts of construction and presentation. I combine processes in fibers, printmaking, painting, and sculpture to produce text-based art. I explore the essence of Homer's Odyssey as an object journeying through time and evolving in form. This transformation in time is at the heart of appropriation, revealing all languages as forms of inheritance, as historical lineages within which the discrete artifact is embedded. In Thalassa, I appropriate text from James Joyce's Ulysses and Nikos Kazantzakis' The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel to manifest my poetry, in text and sculptural forms, as a continuation of historical lineage. This issue of identity is examined by Kimon Friar in his introduction to Kazantzakis' Odyssey in regard to both Joyce and Kazantzakis: "Both works are concerned with the modern [man] in search of a soul, and both utilize the framework of Homer's Odyssey as reference, though in strikingly different ways." Thalassa is a thought-provoking continuation of this dialogue.

Nikos Karabetsos