Belly Button Bound (2023)

‘Belly Button Bound’ was a sculptural installation that simultaneously borrowed from and deconstructed the theatricality of a traditional Greek Chapel. These sculptural arrangements suggest alternate and hidden stories that exist within the Chapel's history and future. Using different symbolic shapes, Alkmini considers how this space is gendered and engenders those who inhabit it. These sculptural pieces act not only as physical entities but as carriers of sound and action, playing with the difficulties of translation, ideas on the merge of Orthodox and non-Orthodox forms of spirituality, of ‘home’ as mythology and images of questionable “Greekness”. In these sculptural arrangements we can almost see a narrator that tries to work through these tactile images that live between the real and mythical, traveling through them and revealing a ritual.

Influenced by texts like the Epic Poem of Gilgamesh, Hesiod’s and Homer’s cosmogony, and Greek trivial family rituals that stem from the marriage of Pagan and Christian traditions, Alkmini attempts to extract ideas and poetic images to create new understandings of these dualities. The work is an attempt to connect religious syncretism, with modern Greek identity and their parallel existences.

The symbolic objects and arrangements in the work are referring to an accumulation of mythological and Greek prophylactic amulets, images that live through Alkmini’s body and get translated through her work. Symbols like the phallus, a symbol in pre/non- Christian

religions and its comical importance. Alkmini questions the use of such a symbol with humor to represent awkwardness, fertility and gender, placing sexual energy/pleasure within the chapel, a space that questions the roles of the physical masculine and feminine body within its architectural barriers. The chapel is a space where pleasure gets received or denied.

What is hidden and revealed during liturgy? Creating intuitive shrines, Alkmini uses materials abstracted from their original use and plays with them to the point that they become fiction to herself. In this piece she attempts to introduce these objects as fiction to the audience by treating them and arranging them until they become abstracted from their original meaning.

Part of ‘to tease, to hold these stories through and through’: an interdisciplinary collaborative exhibition by Alkmini Gkousiari, Isobel O’Donovan and Rosie Trevill. Their works each use material as memory to explore individual sites and histories, in order for gender, language and ritual to be reimagined. Through cross-pollination and overlap between their works, the artists form a shared creative language to discuss themes of mythology, the erotic, ecologies and queerness.

The exhibition included sculpture, photography, writing and textile installation.

The exhibition was funded by Creative Scotland and the Glasgow School of Art as part of the institution's commitment to support graduates disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The opening event was supported by Innis and Gunn.