Maria Ioannou

PUBLIC AWARD @ JELO6 PROJECT CYPRUS 2025

Artist Statement

Rooted in the body’s silent wisdom, my sculptures emerge from a conscious dialogue with gesture, balance, and sensory memory. The white figure stands as a ritual presence — evoking funeral etiquette, ancestral passage, and the purity of transition. Limbs are extended beyond proportion, capturing the kinesthetic pull of memory and the reach toward shared lineage. Gold punctuates the form like a sacred breath — both inheritance and illumination. I work with material as one would with a tradition: slowly, attentively, with reverence. These figures embody not just personal narratives, but collective echoes, participating in the spiritual and cultural weave of community. They are shaped by touch, by movement, by silence — guardians of craft, carriers of ancestral gesture, and witnesses to the enduring poetry of the human form.

Curriculum Vitae

Maria Ioannou (b. 1975, Cyprus) is a graduate of the Thessaloniki School of Fine Arts, where she studied in the workshop of M. Theofylactopoulos. She has also studied psychology, which informs the introspective dimension of her visual practice. Her work has been presented in Cyprus and abroad, receiving important distinctions. Based in Cyprus, she focuses on the field of microsculpture, creating works that balance between the personal and the collective, the fragile and the durable, and the silent and the blatant.

Title: ECHOES OF THE DOMESTIC DIVINE

Kind:Object

Materials: Resin, Wood, Wire, Capsules, Jade Stone