Ioanna Sakellaraki

The Seven Circuits of a Pearl is a visual exploration of the artist’s uneasy process to narrate the secret findings in her late father’s maritime archive through the historic, symbolic and material interpretations of the pearl. At first encountered in the form of a pearl necklace, her father’s, unknown to her, ex-wife appears to wear in his records, it becomes the shiny detail for the reciprocal exchange and anamorphosis of maritime histories between the artist’s homeland Greece and her current place of residence in Australia’s west; the ‘Pearling Capital of the World’ from over a century ago.

 
Developed in the intersection of archives, geographies and material practices, the work reveals a complex composite truth stretching beyond historical facts and towards new subjective relationships between visual registers, the personal and the political. Staging a memory of a trauma while performing a history of the natural world, the inquiry oscillates between the dialectics of the small and the large where the intimate and the infinite find each other and the artist herself. Throughout the process, pearls take all shapes and forms emerging as symbols of desire and longing, embodying the elusive nature of the representation of love. Whether wild or manufactured, they serve as a tangible, material reminder of ghosts, spirits, betrayal, and moral ambiguity.

Amid wild marine molluscs observed under the microscope, archaeological evidence of lost pearling luggers wrecked at the bottom of the ocean and the discovery of a half-brother she has never met but in the depths of her father’s archive, the artist attempts to stay afloat while diving deep inside the oceans of the forever unknown and continuously reformed in her family history and creative practice.