photographic series “Nursery”

This series of photographs began as a project where Ismini Haholiadou was exploring different trajectories in her practice. Where she previously set up spaces and scenes to photograph, in this project she scouted for spaces which she found interesting -aesthetically as well as in the narratives they evoked- and merely set up her camera and photographed them. In these, Haholiadou attempts a take on capturing the idea of a nursery, a greenhouse, where ideas (metaphorically, as well as, literary) are nurtured, with the ultimate intention to be exposed when matured. Currently, this series of photographs may be viewed as mere documentation of the spaces and their conceptual weight, or they may, also, have the capacity to be viewed as completed works in themselves.

Even though the artist chooses rather raw spaces to capture (and at the same time capture the idea which she aims to portray), the detail in each simplistic -one could say- frame, and their aesthetics, is such that the photographs become means of bringing forth the poetics of these raw spaces. The metaphorical weight the greenhouse bares, implies -and at the same time complements the thought- that in such spaces there is always something cultivated, which no one has the ability to foresee how it will evolve. This idea inoculates the feeling of the perpetually incomplete, as the end result only comes with death. Nonetheless, these images bring about feelings of optimism in a palpable manner, even if optimism here tends to fade in the uncertainty of the ending.