Referring to the attempt of an emotional orientation between two overwhelming events in the path of an individual, such as the death of the mother and the experience of motherhood, Dimitra Dede’s book “Mayflies” proposes a sensitive and diaristic visual exploration that sees precisely these two serious events put in relation.
In the meantime of the elaboration of the mourning, the author experiences, discovers and reports the intimate joyful and difficult experience of becoming a mother. Two distinct moments that nevertheless find a temporal and expressive concreteness in the same space.
By contrasting the stylistic features of death and its painful elaboration with those of a new exploration of oneself and one’s own body gained in relation to motherhood, the author creates hybrid images, in which warmth and joy are associated with cold and icy surfaces, a landscape or “world” that suffers the arrogance of life in progress.
A melancholy spectrum suspended between the instinct to life and the icy, painful, indeterminacy of loss change the creative process, which through a succession of chiaroscuro mutations collects the signs of this ambiguous emotional oscillation.
A language-form that gives life to dense, serious images, capable of introducing the reader to an unconscious universe of which one cannot but suffer the gravity and disorientation of a struggling sensitivity.
Giving life to a “black diary”, Dimitra Dede denudes herself, accompanying us with generosity and courage in the complex emotional unconscious of a passing moment.
A journey that image after image, black page after black page, becomes capable of making dense and true not so much the world as apparent as the way, as sometimes, it feels. His cry.
Dimitra Dede (born in Greece) is a London based visual artist working mainly with photography. She studied photography and holds a postgraduate diploma in New Media.
Her practice combines painting and the use of chemicals with photography. The making of the imagery is based on an intuitive process. Her subject matter quests the connection between space and time, memory and displacement, loss and longing, life and the Absurd. Her work has been presented in galleries and festivals both in Europe and in America (Center for Fine Art Photography – Fort Collins, Black Box Gallery-Portland, Brighton Photo Biennial, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Unseen Festival Amsterdam etc.).
‘Mayflies’ is Dimitra’s first book. It was shortlised at the Unseen Dummy Award 2018 (Unseen Festival, Amsterdam).
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