On my way to meet the artist and sculptor Irene Pouliassi, my tooth pain reminds me of Lucille Ball, the famous comedian who claimed that she could intercept Japanese signals on her teeth during the Second World War. The only signal I’m getting from my own is that they need to come out. But what secret knowledge is locked inside these wisdom teeth? As it turns out, Pouliassi seems to be in tune with similar messages from beyond. In the Chelsea squat where she is in residence with the Bomb Factory, the artist has a drawer full of teeth, a hidden stash of hair and antlers and a hairy boob on the wall—or rather, a breast implant with a braided lock of long hair screwed through the center. These are the fruits of her avian practice.
Pouliassi has just closed ‘The Other Side of Paradise’, a group show at the Bomb Factory’s Marylebone site curated by Marcus Nelson and Pallas Citroen. This was the second presentation of her new work: anthropomorphic monsters which she has started summoning in her atelier. “They were inspired by a carnival in Northern Greece and Bulgaria, the Kukeri,” Pouliassi says of her creations. The Kukeri of Greece and Bulgaria are from a time before the parting of seas and fall of Rome. Men dress in pelts, wear wooden animal masks and hang bells on their body, intending to scare away evil spirits. “I like the implication; it’s quite paganistic that people dress like these entities,” Pouliassi explains. Her sculptures function in a similar way, “as a protection and a shield. They are the things we cannot reach anymore that are only in our memories”.
The first appearance of the artist’s totems came earlier this year. Titled ‘Lady Lazarus’, the show ran for two months at Peri Technon in Athens. “This was the first time I said, ‘this is it’: female forms, human forms, entities, bodies there looking at you. They are monsters, they have a sexuality, you can see the way they are dressing.” Standing six feet tall, her works crowded a small room in clusters. Stovepipe hats covered faces, plunging necklines did the talking. They’d taken their shoes off and left them, like antlers discarded after mating season. It’s impossible to look at these entities and not personify them. They might be standing still for now, but what happens when the gallery lights go off at the end of the day? Do they lift their hats and ring out bells with voices from beyond?
When she first began showing, Pouliassi’s work was extremely abstract. “I did 24 vertebrae stacked from piles of 1 to 24 to represent growing up. And then I started putting clothes together and it began to transform, as I started to make sense out of the forms.” Over time, she was presenting hanging pieces of bones and fabric or teeth implanted into walls like black magic gone wrong (Episode Null: Remembering Dad [2019]) “I always liked the human form”, she explains. “If you see it, you can identify yourself.”
In one of Pouliassi’s first exhibitions, an installation in Northern Greece, she started exploring “what death means. My work looked back into violent spaces”. She worked in the concentration camps built during the 1990s and the Kosovo Wars. The memory of those lost– Pouliassi’s beloved father, who died when she was 10, the victims of war crimes during Balkan conflicts from the massacre at Srebrenica to the Kosovo Wars– is what vibrates from her newest totems, but she insists the work itself is not political. “I’m Greek so I’m always trying to say no to politics”, she says. “But I cannot get away from it.” The myths of the current Greek state are those resurrected during its independence conflicts—Laskarina Bouboulina, the first recognized female admiral who was imprisoned on false charges of witchcraft, was the focus of one of Pouliassi’s early commissions. “The materials function as an allegory of the fetish of victory, but also as trophies of battles. She was a heroine, but she also had to battle with herself.” A few days after my studio visit, I speak with Pouliassi over the phone. She explains that she has had difficulties accidentally referring to North Macedonia as simply Macedonia. The question of North Macedonia’s new name is one of shifting social indemnity, in the same way that Pouliassi’s sculptures are a piecing together of metaphysical– rather than geographical– discontinuity.
Growing up in Corfu, Pouliassi says it was better to be an artist than a doctor. “My family are musicians, weavers, sculptors and carpenters. It wasn’t an academic art education; it was the village. It was a way of expression.” She was surrounded by objects of history, from carving tools passed down the generations to guns in family homes—in some ways, the ghosts of her past. “I still have my great grandmother’s gun—she fought in the war—and it’s a woman’s gun. The gun means a specific thing, but for me it was empowering. She was a woman, going up the mountains with three kids in the 1930s.” Symbols of her ancestry are littered throughout her work, but for Pouliassi channeling this sixth sense is unintentional. “For me this is reverse engineering, trying to find things about people and reconstruct archetypes and ideals. What belongs to people that was thrown away?”
Acting almost as an emotional archeologist, the sculptor stitches together the unwanted and discarded personal detritus of others, much like a carrion bird. Pouliassi works with a group of grandmothers who regularly give clothes to charity, taking what is torn or can’t be donated for her own work. “They call me up and say ‘Irene! I have some nice, ripped textures for you!’ And I love it." The aforementioned breast implant was sent by a collector, who wishes to remain anonymous because disposing of these types of things is no joke. Neither is what Pouliassi is doing with them. “I have a bowl of teeth! And a few bags,” Pouliassi reaches over me and opens three drawers excitedly. “The police have a whole department telling you what you can do and what you can’t do.” As it turns out, it’s easier to bring in teeth from Greece than it is to hightail a few packs of Vogues over from Spain.
The artist’s work breaches taboos about the sanctity of the human form. “My work is about speaking on these taboos and what they mean”, she says. “I experimented with shock factor; human hair, bones, teeth as tombstones for rebuilt identities. It’s a transition to building yourself out of trauma, and I think that’s where I am now.” Despite the hassle, Pouliassi would never use her own clothes or hair—that would be too easy. “It’s about what hair represents, drawing from community. In these totems there are many people in there, and I don’t know who it comes from.” Her vision reminds me of the Cypriot fashion designer Hussein Chalayan’s narrative of displacement, where models wore dresses and transformed a table into a skirt in a clear comment about the plight of the refugee—leaving behind the physical memories of home inspired by the designers own experience. Pouliassi’s wayward totems don’t mourn the physical remainders of identity, but the evermore distant memory of those lost, amalgamated through clothes and body parts donated by strangers.
Looking at those jars of teeth makes me feel mine even more, pulsing as Pouliassi speaks about her upcoming solo show, which opens at Coups Contemporary on the 22nd of June. She will be reinventing her practice there once again. But for now, the idea of having the wisdom teeth that are ripping my jaw apart immortalized in a sculpture is an opportunity I hesitate to pass up. So maybe I’ll send in my teeth and see what happens—perhaps a totem will speak with the voice of my ancestors, or perhaps the anonymity of the act of turning them over is enough. Nonetheless, Pouliassi will keep them in her drawer, waiting for them to speak to her. “It’s an action open for translation”, she says. “I’m not going anywhere.”