Echoes by Despo Sophocleous

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Despo Sophocleous

Despo has recently produced a series of pendants made of wood and cotton strings, thought in such a way that they have to be adjusted to the body, becoming alive by being worn and producing sounds and movement. Combined with the architectural construction of the pieces, the noise emitted becomes an «echo», a trace and memory of a specific place and time.

Favoring resilient wood such as walnut, cherry and ash, Sophocleous builds individual yet complex elements, sometimes empty, sometimes full. Each piece is carefully designed before being bound together with invisible joints, creating a mobile wooden necklace on which she voluntarily leaves hand-written annotations to remind us of the marks we leave behind us.

Acting as a mapmaker, she highlights specific places that we are led to imagine and that we believe we imagine. What she is showing us is that our memories, sometimes true and accurate, can also be easily distorted. As we encounter places, those places imprint on our memory but also transform and sometimes fade away.

Despo’s pendants offer us a representation that we would like to hold for true and real, yet they are simply « echoes » and nothing more. 


About the Artist:
Born in 1977 in Nova Scotia, Sophocleous studied Philosophy and Anthropology in the University College of Cape Breton, Sydney, Nova Scotia. Following her call on jewellery Design, she undertook a BFA in Jewellery and Metalsmithing at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax in 2004. She then benefitted from an exchange program at the Pforzheim University Faculty of Design in 2006. From 2008 to 2015, she remained in Germany to continue her researches and experiments at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts with Otto Künzli as a mentor and teacher.