Art

Born and raised under a junta on the isle of Lesbos, Greece, Eurydice Eve ran off to America at fifteen. She learned early on that history—from war to invention, from philosophy to theology—happens on the bodies of women, often literally (in the form of mass rape and abductions of women as spoils) and always metaphorically. Whether elevated like Helen of Troy or Maria Magdalena, or vilified like Helen of Troy or Maria Magdalena, women signify passion, redemption, war spoils and conquest, and have been used to justify major events in history. The ubiquitous bodies of women, as mothers, as beloveds, as artists’ models and poets’ muses, as objects of beauty or terror, reverence or disgust, have been the single consistent metaphor of Eurydice’s artistic evolution. The idea of woman encompasses the continuous ambivalence toward life (and sexuality and mortality) that initiates and then sustains the male aesthetic domination of art and literature. Eurydice has explored this theme and only this theme in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and in filmmaking, painting, drawing, printmaking, collages, installations, and, most recently, out of respect for the traditional unrewarded arts of women throughout history, in hand stitching. By temperament and ideology, Eurydice practices the synergy of artistic media and incorporates the lessons from each medium in her overall oeuvre. She is interested in opening up new venues of expression and subverting familiar modalities of paradigms that have been co-opted by patriarchy and late capitalism in order to present an alternate reality which she hopes will be more faithful to women’s interior lives and psyches. Her art centers on lifting the veils, layer after layer. Apocalypse means unveiling in Greek. 

Eurydice Eve chose to raise her child in sunny Miami Beach, resisted offers to write a book on A Year in the Life of a Pregnant Sex Writer, and instead applied for and was awarded by a jury of artists prime studio space at the Art Center of S. Florida on Lincoln Rd in Miami Beach. For the next ten years she worked exclusively as an artist and her career change coincided with the arrival of Art Basel and the artistic renaissance it brought to Miami. Her artwork was bought by major collectors and museums and she was regularly commissioned by private businesses. She gradually turned her attention to embroidery, an ancient feminine craft that brought together her Eastern and Western heritages and which she turned into feminist avant-garde art. Following her 10-year retrospective, with her daughter now older, she resumed writing, just as Syrian refugees inundated her native island. This experience gave her the framework she needed to ground her story of the refugee experience to the 21st c. internet-centered present time and in the process reinvent the ancient Greek tropes that inform her take on the world.

I am a dangerous artist. I feel I have to work where I'm at risk, where I am out of my comfort zone, where I am not me as my little dogs know me. If I don't break the rules that I have been taught, I do not see the point of making anything. Since I do not work to make money, I need an equally driving purpose to keep working rather than lying on the beach. The high of fear, of going too far, of not being able to control the consequences of my actions, of flying off the handle, as is the expression, excites me & compels me. I must create something slightly threatening to myself. The inspiration starts with the centrifugal forces between my fears & my fearlessness. I create to overcome the bonds & bounds I've inherited, to leave myself & become a voice for the (female) human condition. It started with my being born on Lesbos. I was born on the very beach where Sappho jumped off the cliff into the sea. That's the same beach where the ashes of Orpheus, acc. to the legend, were washed off after he was killed by wild maenads & dismembered. It's a special place, you might say. I was a Lesbian in a very conservative Eastern & Southern European culture, which is seen as the cradle of the West. Weighty heritage. My relationship with that word, whose meaning was bastardized by a simple accident of birth of the poetess Sappho in 700BC, affected my sense of self. I always thought I might end up being burned on a stake in the middle of a town square. Sexuality became my metaphor of choice at an awfully young age before I knew what it meant.