Maria Varela is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on creative applications of new technologies, textile data visualization and collaborative production with women communities. She experiments with ways in which the archival event is transcribed from the digital environment to the physical world. She creates digital and physical artifacts and events, exploring concepts such as identity, memory, tradition and their constructions. She has presented her work in numerous exhibitions internationally, in museums such as TMoFA (Taiwan), Bozar (Belgium), EMST, MOMus and the Museum of the History of Greek Costume (Greece) as well as in group exhibitions such as Festival de Arte_Videobrasill (Sao Paulo), Media Art Biennale (Wroclaw), Siggraph (Vancouver), Transmediale (Berlin), ISWC (Seattle), Piksel (Bergen), Tetramatyka (Lviv), Visual Dialogues – Onassis Foundation (Athens) etc. In 2021 he was awarded the Selected Art Award by the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan.
She completed her postgraduate studies at MA Interactive Media (2010), Goldsmiths College University and PG Fine Arts (2007) Central Saint Martins, London and her undergraduate studies at the Department of Fine Arts (2005), University of Ioannina, Greece.
Previous work
Project concept
The textile will be a woven archive, which will visualize the geological elements of the marble that was mined from the quarry of Ag. Eleftheriou on the Outer side of Tinos. Geological heritage is the set of forms and processes that make up the geological history of any region. Different geological events, conditions and processes are reflected in mineral rock structures. Geosites tell a snapshot of the long history of the land in that particular area. For this specific project, I regard Agios Eleftherios quarry as an autonomous geosite, an “observer” of the successive events of the area.
Rock N Rose
The textile is a woven archive, which visualizes the geological elements of the marble that was mined from the quarry of Ag. Eleftheriou on the Outer side of Tinos. Specifically, the numerical data of the chemical analysis of the rock as recorded by the Hellenic Authority for Geological and Mining Research (E.A.G.M.E.) create the fabric pattern, while the color palette is defined by the petrography of the rock. At the same time, its decoration derives from a filet lace design, of the traditional Tinian needlework technique.
Marble mining is a laborious task that occupied the male population of the island. To fill the gap left by the men employed in the quarry, women took up the strenuous agricultural activities. A traditional filet lace design is transcribed into a different technique that of weaving, while at the same time the narrative of cultural heritage is inscribed in that of geological heritage. The work examines a different gendered division of labor defined by the presence of marble in the area.
The work was woven at Zarifeios weaving School of Tinos.
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