Hariclia Michailidou
Born in Greece, studied in Greece, Belgium and USA. I studied and worked in architecture, art, poetry, science, and cosmology. I continue to love and be curious about all of them. Two forces of the near past and of the near future were always present in my life, both exercising great powers on me transforming my life and later my work; certainly, those forces in addition to the primordial, the cosmic forces that have evolved us into the present and continuously act upon us transforming us through time.
I think very little of what we know influences our work, what mostly influences our works we ignore, or we do not remember, but it exists in a universe within us, somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious, and that is the most powerful part which shapes our characters and our works. From that place from the universe within my work mostly springs and evolves.
The sweet fragrances of our planet, the strong desire, the wisdom of great teachers, the grandeur of the universe, our conception of infinity and eternity, the unknown, at times tormenting and at times exalting me are strong forces that form and evolve myself and my work.
Lately my work has been mostly influenced by silent reflections, from dreams, the opening of the skies and the flight into the night. It is about revelations of the bliss, of beauty and the wisdom of the night.
Hariclia, your practice unfolds as a meditation on light as both phenomenon and metaphor, where reflections upon reflections generate entire cosmologies. Could you speak about the moment you first recognized light not simply as an element of painting but as a generative force that mirrors the universe itself, and how this realization set in motion the decades-long evolution of your work from watercolor circles to vast cosmic formations?
I delighted looking at the light for a very long time, sometimes looking at the sun directly through the tree foliage. After I painted the trees and foliage with watercolors in the park, I started to paint the light alone, unconsciously as circles. I painted free hand circles watercolor until they became large, transparent and perfect, throughout the year 1998.
One day I made prints of the watercolors and began to cut them and made collages using rectangular sections at first. After I cut the rectangular section for quite a long time, one day I cut a rectangular piece diagonally and put them in a circle, I made the first circular collage, radial pattern. In 2001 I scanned the original watercolors and began to make patterns with the aid of the computer. With the advantages of the computer, mirror image in particular, I soon realized that all possible geometric patterns can be designed the way I was approaching it. And I understood that all the pattern variations in nature were possible that way, and that way alone.
I saw that the circles were like reflections of stars, and a group of circles together were like star constellations. When I cut sections (sectors) at progressively increasing angles and turned them in a circular motion, I was getting patterns that looked like nature’s patterns in all possible variations, starting from polygonal to bilateral and spiral patterns.
That was how I understood that light in its circular reflections and its circular motion are the creative media and creative process of all formations in the universe. I wrote a book explaining this as well as I could, the title is “From Formless to All Forms”. Later, when I created groups of patterns and spread them on the computer screen and turned the background black, I understood I was looking at the night sky, and when playing with them compressing and expanding them all of a sudden I saw at some areas the patterns to lit up like stars and galaxies, I can say that was the most exciting moment of my work. Since then, I find myself lost deeper and further in a universe that never stops delighting and enthralling me.
Abstract art has often been described as a vehicle for the spiritual, a way of articulating what cannot be grasped through language alone. How has abstraction served as your own vessel for exploring the unseen dimensions of existence, and what do you consider the role of the spiritual in shaping the perceptual and emotional resonance of your images?
I was enjoying abstraction before I even knew the name. As a little girl I used to peel off with my fingers from the wall, the white layer of paint my mother used to paint my room, while lying down on the side of my bed. I was discovering underneath very layers of sharp colors, greens, yellows, blues, browns and I used to distract myself with the different shapes formed with the colors. Sometimes figures of different things appeared and disappeared fast, for other things to form in front of my eyes. Rarely was I able to capture the same image. Later my mom would plaster that area and for a while I would contemplate the thick grains of sand plastered by my mother’s hand, until I began to peel off next to it, again layers of colors, layers of history.
I think it is also a way of seeing, like Michelangelo, he saw David within a quarry, or in cloud formations he saw God and Adam touching fingers, which he painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
It could be that the unconscious eye sees. Don’t we see resemblances today between images of discoveries through the telescopes or the microscopes and abstract images of the past years, before we were able to see, and to know?
I think it depends on the ability of the eye to see, the internal and external eye, and I am very often amazed at what I can see, masterpieces in the dust, in the dirt, on floors on walls, and in the light? The light scintillating in front of my eyes, weaving the most supreme in beauty and complexity patterns, are of the most delightful experiences I had.
For me abstraction is like a continuous discovery, like the unknown part of the universe, the hidden part of reality, always the larger part, the endless part in everything. Abstraction is making manifest secrets everywhere while we keep questioning. We are living in that space; it is like the future that keeps opening up before us.
Within that future there can be glimpses of those hidden realities, multiple universes as science calls it, or glimpses of spiritual realms as spirituality calls it. It has been a great blessing for me that the guidance of the spiritual was present in my work even before I started to paint. I did not understand it at the time, only realized later as I connected the dots and understood its greatness. I have been humbled for the blessing, and I am very grateful.
Your biography situates you at a crossroads of historical upheaval and the emergence of new scientific, artistic, and cultural forces. How have these dual inheritances, the weight of the past and the thrust of the future become inscribed in your visual vocabulary, and do you see your cosmic symmetries and asymmetries as a way of reconciling or even transcending those temporal contradictions?
Our generation experienced the extremes; our parents lived the frightening extremes of the past and we experienced them through our parents. But luckily, we have mostly experienced the thrust of the future, life not death, enthusiasm not agony, hope not fear, growth and expansion not pressure and limitation.
I experience symmetry as order, as limitation, as compression, limited possibilities and reduction, but also as the generative force of asymmetry. Asymmetry is the generative force of symmetry, it is growth and expansion, it has endless possibilities. Both are necessary for the creation of the universe and for the creation of everything within it. In my work, the patterns represent order, and there is a limited number of them, although the number is enormous. When the patterns are projected, spread randomly on the screen, their internal order has been modified or not, they look to be disorderly, those disorderly images can always generate order and symmetry, and they have endless possibilities in creating, in generating new things.
I could say symmetry and order is the creative force, while asymmetry is disorder is a destructive force. A star is symmetry and order in the shape of a sphere, when it explodes in a supernova it becomes clouds of dust, asymmetry and disorder, and from within it new stars, new symmetries are generated. They both manifest in the universe; both are necessary for the cosmic renewal and the continuum. It is as if for each generation the past offers asymmetry (destruction) while the present is symmetry (creation).
The circle in your work is at once primordial and infinitely open, a form that recurs from atomic nuclei to galactic spirals. What does the circle mean to you as both symbol and structure, and in what ways does its endless return embody your philosophy of form evolving toward and away from symmetry?
I remember how much I loved making the free hand circular motion. I remember my friend asking me to add a square or a triangle, but I could not. Their destiny was pre ordered, I did not know that at the time, but later I understood. Circular motion I believe is the expression of the intelligent mind of the universe; the circular motion puts things into order. Order is inescapable in a circular motion. While working on the patterns I realized that every pattern was accomplished through the circular motion of the circles. Circles as a reflection of stars, star constellations, galaxies, completed in a geometric pattern with the fourth dimension of time, a continuous circular motion. The polygons, the square, the triangle, the bilateral form, the spiral all created in spherical, three-dimensional formations, because light is a sphere, a bubble, compressed possibly in a disc form.
A circle is symmetry, it has an infinity of symmetries. All the ideal forms of Plato are created only with circles, and everything else, since as was told by ancient mystics and discovered later by science, everything is a creation of light, from the very deep space all the way down to the quantum world where photons in waves of light are detected.
We are made of light, we have a body of light, on the light form the physical, material body is constructed, the same with everything else. The sun reflects its own form a circle, during an eclipse we see the new reflections, new shapes (crescent and rings), a photon must be a circle, in a supernova the star shape is destroyed, there is asymmetry, there is disorder. Within a nebula the continuous circular motion of dust clouds brings order to create new stars, and their reflections create new patterns.
Poetry and science are two currents that flow through your practice. Do you view them as parallel languages converging within your work, or as oppositional modes of thought whose tensions spark new possibilities on the canvas? How do you weave together the rigor of scientific observation with the lyricism of poetic imagination?
For me, poetry is the creative energy and can manifest as beauty. It is the force that ignited mostly from passion, desire, forces creativity (poetry) forwards, with beauty its aim and its end, for there is nothing beyond beauty. For any form of art to be beautiful, it must be imbued by poetic energy, and it is best when poetic energy is sparkled by love, a poem, a painting, a sculpture, music, dance, to be beautiful their essence must be poetic. Poetry, in Greek means “making”, making of a poem with words, making a painting with colors, a sculpture with stone, music with sound, there should be poetry into the making of any art. All of nature sings its beauty, and the universe hums its glory as it evolves in time.
Science is a way of seeing, contemplating the cosmos. Cosmos, the word in Greek means beauty, all beauty is poetic, what we see through the microscopes and the telescopes is beautiful, it is poetic. Perhaps the instruments used are rigorous but the observations through them are even more poetic, they are cosmic poetry, cosmic lyricism, cosmic beauty.
Cosmos, a continuum of poetry that we hope to be infinite and forever, the continuum is the endless possibilities, the evolution, poetry is the beauty in its making. That infinitum inspires the artistic imagination, silently, softly permeates us and entangles us in the cosmic existence, in the cosmic passion, in the cosmic wonder and moves us into joining the singing, joining the dancing to glorify something that may remain forever unknown in its entirety. Perhaps it is infinitely large to know, perhaps it is infinitely small to know, perhaps we lose the one into the other, for not only the infinitely small can be lost into the infinitely large but the other way around also, the universe within, imagine? And that is impossible for the mind to grasp, yet existence has its ways even beyond the mind in creativity, in the ability in all things to be creative.
You often suggest that the universe is not fixed but continually recreated in light, a mirror image endlessly unfolding. To what extent is painting for you an act of participating in this recreation, an artistic cosmogenesis rather than merely depicting what is already there?
I believe the universe began to be created in light and continues to be created and recreated in light, from the atomic to the cosmic and from the cosmic to the atomic and back from the atomic to the cosmic. Everything created is also creative. With photosynthesis, the cosmic (light), becomes physical, becomes material and becomes cosmic by being an expansion of the cosmos. And everything else continues in recreating itself and the cosmos, we are entities of the cosmic, and we embody the cosmic within us.
Light is the cosmic media, what created and continues to create everything, circles of light are the building blocks of the universe. Though unconsciously at the beginning, circles are the building blocks of my entire work for over twenty-five years, I only continue to expand it, to sculpt it, to modify it, transform it, evolve it, it is a process of continuous metamorphosis.
Yes, I remember at one point, when I was making the universe plastic by enormously contracting and expanding it, I got afraid that it was going to harm the universe itself somehow, and I stopped, who would want that? Later I thought, I am rendering the universe within malleable, so I didn’t have to worry, and I decided to continue. It is an artistic cosmogenesis. It could also be that everything that is there, is present already, perhaps as another reality we cannot see, if we consider higher levels of consciousness, or multiverses, who can really say.
If there is no time, as science tells us lately, if we can see into the future the same way we see into the past, then nothing can be born or change, and that would be a bit disheartening. Perhaps art gives us access to those higher realities, offers us glimpses into a future or into a higher realm. Art did that in the past by opening windows into truths we did not know yesterday but we do know today, and likewise art can reveal in abstractions realms of tomorrow unknown to us today.
In your reflections on symmetry and asymmetry, you question whether the cosmos is inherently balanced or fractured, singular or multiple. Could you elaborate on how these meditations resonate with your lived experience and how they influence your decisions in composition, rhythm, and color as you work?
Is the universe symmetrical? I thought it could be, since light reflects and mirrors itself, and that property of light manifests everywhere in what we see through the microscope and telescope, in its mirroring image capacity we own all existing patterns. It could be symmetrical, but then since it always is in motion, since it is continuously recreated, there is asymmetry in its growth, in its evolution, in its playfulness. And that will mean it is singular and also it is fractured and multiple, it possesses both qualities and I think it possesses all qualities known and unknown to us. I think phases of symmetry and asymmetry are present in everything and everywhere, life is change, life is evolution, life is motion and as all is alive, all changes, all evolve, all, as it moves.
I use photoshop, all the colors you see are the colors of the original watercolors. As I keep modifying the images, the colors become more and more transparent like light, my work begins as light and now I see it ends as light also. My choice of colors, and that is going back to the watercolors, it was spontaneous, I picked the colors with no thought, just by the need from within, I could say. The compositions (except for the patterns, which took a book to explain), are also spontaneous. I should say there was never a decision as to composition, rhythm, color, when I painted with watercolors, I remember my eye was only fixed to the tip of the brush and followed its motion, I only looked at the whole painting after it finished. And now, with the mouse in my hand I follow its movement on the screen and if the eye agrees, is satisfied, I continue until I find it is complete, it is good or perhaps wonderful. I could often stop earlier or I could still continue, there are many possibilities even between variations, as a continuous change, transformation happens.
Many of your works carry titles that evoke journeys, “caves in the heart,” “cosmic shores,” “dance of shadow,” as if each series is both a cartography of inner states and a mapping of stellar space. How do you conceive of your art as a voyage, and what do you hope the viewer discovers when traversing these visual terrains?
Caves in the heart, dates late seventies when I was a student of architecture in Belgium. Luckily, we had a great number of art classes, and I must have been quite good as I remember the students next to me would stop doing their projects and would look at me working on mine, and they called me the artist. My architecture teachers would send me to show my artwork to some of the best painters. “The Dance of Shadows” was at the same time, and it is ink on paper. A few years ago, I published a book of both with the title “caves in the heart and the dance of the shadows”. The title comes from Plato’s allegory of the cave. It was my understanding that what we see, what we experience, is not necessarily real, it can be false, and it is just manifesting as such.
The very first image I recognized my work to be of the cosmos, I named it “first night” and the series that came out of it, I named “cosmic nights”. The following series is Cosmic nights cosmic shores, where I project images from terrestrial experiences, from caves in the heart and the dance of the shadows, on the images of cosmic nights. All my work is of inner states, the early work is of experiences within the terrestrial shores, experiences of innocence, of experience, and of the wisdom derived from it, of strong emotional states of the mind in abstract form. My latest work is of the inner experiences of the cosmic. We are cosmic beings, it was my greatest blessing of all, the experience of the cosmic, years before I began to paint. As in a frightening dream we wake up from dreaming to awakening, experiencing something extraordinarily strong in one reality can open a gate into another reality, not in a dream alone but in life as well. It is possible and it is awesome; it is an experience that leaves a human being in awe forever.
I often saw photos in public media taken by the telescopes that reminded me very much of images of my work and posted them together on social media, under the title, “art versus science”. Well, I hope the viewer can enjoy the images of the cosmic realms as much as I enjoy painting them, and perhaps their spirit can take a flight to the faraway astronomical distances my soul took me to.
“And so, my soul rises to the heavens above and comes back to tell you of a wonder and more”, this is the last line of one of my poems, with the title, “Cosmic Wonder”. I wrote poems through the years, I love poetry.
Your career began in architecture before evolving fully into painting and digital forms. How has that architectural training shaped your sensitivity to structure, proportion, and spatial poetics in your artworks, and do you feel that the “poetics of space” you reference emerges partly from this foundation?
Back in high school, I was in love with physics and chemistry, and I was thinking of becoming a scientist. When I finished high school, I was told to study architecture, and I did. In architecture I discovered the artistic side of architecture, and that was the beginning of my love for art. And then later while working in architecture I had the chance to work with computers, a tool that was necessary for my work, because my work would not be possible without the use of the computer. Architecture certainly influenced my work, you are trained to think, to feel in four dimensions. Space is present throughout my work, space as we know it early on, and later it becomes cosmic space, and then later again there is continuous sculpting and modifying of cosmic spaces into recognizable space. The colors and light in the church and the park were what I was first tempted to paint. Soon both were becoming one, both spaces filled with the same light, which light soon I began to paint as circles.
It was I believe the light that connected me with the cosmic light, light is cosmic. I saw the circular reflections of light in the physical material world, in its formations which are the frameworks of the material formations we see. And with the reflections of light, I started to construct the cosmic formations and the cosmos.
The space in the “poetics of space” is the cosmic space; cosmic light filled the terrestrial spaces and connected me with the cosmic space. It is the space where I voyage, through cosmic realms, and poetics refers in the Greek translation of the word, to its making, its poetry, its beauty, there is no beauty without poetry.
You have described moments of hesitation, standing before infinity and asking whether to stop or take one more step. What sustains you in those moments of uncertainty, and what do you think compels an artist to move ever further into the unknown rather than remain within the boundaries of what has already been achieved?
Those are moments of being overwhelmed, of being totally satisfied, complete, totally thankful for what I already have received. I believe we need to experience infinity, it is an inherent need, perhaps because we are an infinity in a way that we cannot understand. That is maybe why we fight for more, more of something, money, success, material things, which is a false understanding. What we need more are not material things or things we can count but emotional experiences, spiritual experiences, love, joy, bliss, true knowledge, wisdom, those we cannot measure, we cannot count. Those can offer us a glimpse of infinity and a glimpse of infinity is infinite.
With my work I was often at that point of experiencing infinity, and I was asking myself if I needed any more, more images, more variations. And I thought, if I stopped earlier and I didn’t do the last variation, the last variation wouldn’t exist, what would come next wouldn’t exist if I stopped, for every new image is a new revelation, a new discovery, a new joy for myself and for others. To exist was what was important, for all things that exist, their existence is first and most, what is important. That is perhaps how the whole universe is a creative creation, everything that exists is creative, it creates something, a sound, a wave, a blade of grass, a flower, a mother’s milk, a bee’s honey, everything created creates and truly loves to create. As if creativity is the life, the heartbeat of the universe, as it joins all in a dance as a cosmic whole, enraptured, inescapably forever.