Zoe Iatridis

Artist Statement

Last August, my mom and I were sharing a bed in a hotel room in Cleveland. I was lying awake on my side, unable to sleep, watching the rhythmic breathing of her silhouette in the dark. I had been awake for minutes or hours, I wasn’t sure, but could see the very beginning blue of dawn through the crack in the blinds when she turned over in her sleep, facing me now, and grasped my open hand resting in the space between us. I was unaware of needing her comfort, and she was unaware of offering it, and we laid there clutching each other in the dark, by instinct.

To exist is to explode into splinters; the sense of belonging and selfhood that I seek comes only in fleeting moments like this one. As I’ve grown older, home has become not a physical site to return to, but an ephemeral collection of fragments. I carry them with or around me in a liminal space accessible only in glimpses—in dreams, or prayer, or certain silences. My work documents my search through this spiritual landscape of memory, familial history, and the transient bonds that we take root in. Each painting is an entryway into a realm that is both familiar and wholly unrecognizable to me.

These paintings tell a story that I know by heart and will forever be unearthing. The figures in them shift in and out of darkness as I, an observer in this murky space, follow the thread that ties me to each of them. I know these figures and I don’t, they are me and they aren’t, and I love them in some deep pocket of my chest. I reach for them in the dark and I find them, by instinct.