Androulla Michael *
In tumultuous times Androulla Michael focuses her mind and energy into positive outlets, documenting found marks that gesture the sign of the cross, in the banalities of everyday life. These appear in and out of form in the shadows of a wall or tree, in the cracks of pavements, in the overlaying of clouds on the infinite blue, in the caress of window mullion and muntin by draperies, in the markings of roads and sky, and in the nudge of ordinary objects given to banal surfaces.
In the mastery of timing, these evanescent crosses celebrate light as form-giving, shadow as surreptitious texture and space as life-affirming. These collectively can be seen as “via crucis” – physical markers of her journey in re-finding the beauty of the world and her affirmative self.
“In times of trouble, we tend to see everything in a negative light… In this space, I’dgo on long walks and always find myself fixated on the horizon. But the horizon, to me, looked like one long ‘minus sign’, a definite negativity wherever I went. I realisedthat if I kept walking, eventually I would find something to subvert the horizontality of what was in front of me. Soon I would find a tree, or a post, or a building that wouldturn that ‘minus’, a negative, into a ‘plus’, a positive sign, quite figuratively.”
– Androulla Michael
