Chatting with Arieta Stavridou
I met Arieta Stavridou personally in 2016 at a seminar on polymer clay.
5 years later I am surprised by her work and the experimentation she does with the materials but also that she dares and combines so many different types of art and techniques with each other.
When I made her the proposal for this short interview and said yes, I started thinking about how to preface it.
I had a hard time truth to be told.
Sculpture, engraving, painting, are the first 3 easily recognizable arts that so skillfully combines and have a common material that holds them together, the polymer clay.
Arietta for me is a “very heavy concept” and I will dare to call her a visual artist.
In my eyes she is a complicated artistic personality, and a trademark of hers are the teapots. The way she turns a simple utility object into a piece of art is disarming.
Looking at this specific artistic “period” of hers, you can easily understand the evolutionary course of her work, and its peak.
The magic that Arieta does in my opinion is that she realizes this climax and alternates her inspiration and the object of her research at that moment just before the viewer begins to decline or become tiring for the viewer.
When did you start dealing with polymer clay? How was your first contact with this material and how did you decide to deal with teapots?
Every time I made something, I wanted to go a little further and then the long journey began. Books, videos, tutorials and live seminars by world-renowned artists. For a long time I was involved in creating millefiori canes. Using it on small surfaces was not enough for me and that was when I started working on larger objects…as a tea lover I started to dress my teapots. Teapots with many different and special shapes dressed with many different and colorful canes, it was around the same time that I started to deal with my dishes also large surfaces worked with more balance in terms of composition and color!
Your social media page is called Big Fish. Tell us a little about it and why big fish?
My big fish page is a page that I share with people everything I create in my workshop, whether it is with a crochet hook, a canvas brush, clay…and you ask me why big fish?!
Years ago I noticed that I have a soft spot in fish, as a shape, color movement, freedom!
Fish everywhere, painted on paper, on canvases, even on my body! So I decided to honor it by baptising my page big fish, ending up with the fish being my trademark!!
After the teapots and the decorative dishes you made, we saw you giving weight to portraits. You combined polymer clay with painting, engraving and sculpture. The results were real pieces of art with character and structure, and in my opinion they are riveting. A series of work with portraits and self-portraits in which I have noticed a special feature. Everything has a very strong expressiveness and a power in the eyes. Their look and expression are so intense that they really capture you.
Has this difficult period for everyone, with the virus, affected you artistically? I feel that it did not put you in a wait but it gave you inspiration! Tell us a few words about these portraits. How did you get your inspiration, what were your stimulus?
The period we are going through is undoubtedly a difficult period, for some less for others more. A period that tests our endurance, plays with our emotions and puts us to re-evaluate many things.
The beginning of this different era we live in, found me in my workshop wanting to express myself as Arietta, woman, artist, person … this is how I started my female portraits, women of any color, with a different look and eyes that try to convey to us what each one of them carries in their souls. A series of portraits of looks and emotions that helped me to pass my hours, days and months as calmly and creatively as possible.
Tell us a little about these black and white landscapes and the combination of women forms they include?
And why again a woman, because I believe that as a woman I too can express and express better the female emotions, these many different intense and sometimes, confused emotions!!
Among other things we have seen you teaching your techniques on some well-known international sites related to polymer clay. Tell us about these techniques and the teaching part. What does it mean for you and what would you advise a young creator who is just starting their creative journey with polymer clay?
To invest their time in personal practice or to learn techniques and attend seminars of other artists so that through them they find their way?
The teaching part is another key chapter for me. My main occupation here in Cyprus is that I work as an art teacher in a High School. When the conditions allow it beyond the various materials known to children, I try to introduce them with the polymer clay, to get to know this unknown for many, material with the so many beautiful and unlimited possibilities! What I say to the students and to anyone who wants to deal with and get to know this material better is to do it with all their soul I believe that anything less does not fit and nor worth the polymer clay. They will have to devote many hours of work, experimentation, research on the internet, to get acquainted with other artists’ techniques to attend seminars! They will always have something to get by adapting it to their work, thus slowly coming to their own identity!! All this, is something I do too, after so many years of dealing with clay. The research, the effort and the work does not stop, I still learn and evolve, for this and every time they ask me to teach I feel great honor and joy to share as much and whatever knowledge I have, but I still think about it and I always say that I still learn with you…
Arieta, thank you very much for your time! It was a really nice experience to chat and it gave us great pleasure because the friends of Piloforizo and we, had the opportunity to get to know you a little better.
I want to thank you and piloforizo for doind me the honor to give this interview. Our roads met a few years ago on the occasion of our common love for polymer clay and I wish this relationship that we created to last for many more years. Always be well !!
