Bugs and Leaves - works of Eleftheria Lialios (2016-2017) - Ποιειν Και Πραττειν

Bugs and Leaves - works of Eleftheria Lialios (2016-2017)

I finished the Leaves and Bugs work for 2016-17. Amazing to see the small details of leaves and all sorts of bugs that I have found. Nature. Working on a show at one of the nature museums here in Chicago.

In 2016, the same passion for photographing leaves, extended to finding dead bugs, cicadas, moths, beetles, and butterflies. Laying them on my light table and photographing each of them made me see the connections of the Leaves work with the new insects I found in my house, garden, and neighborhood. Seeing all of its perfection, in the exquisite abstraction of nature. Here, the precision of nature is clad with the royal colors of life, with beauty that can be found in all life forms, on a slowly dying planet.

Last year, I started to photograph single leaves that were found in my neighborhood and placed them on my light table. What surprised me were the details and spots that came up from the light table, showing decay and the fragility of each leaf, while at the same time conveying their individual structure, beauty, and place in nature. I did not put a glass plate on top of the leaf to flatten it out. What was seen through the lens were the natural folds of the leaves, spotted with bits of dirt and pollution, but mostly seen through the strength of its spine and all the interwoven parts and sections that followed within a huge map of exact detail.

The spine of a simple leaf is like the spine of humanity. Branching out to different sub-sections, all sourced from this same core, all beautiful in design, all important in holding the leaf in its place in nature and our world.

Interesting your work about the dissertation on Marx in which he compares Epicur and Democrit because I consider the leaves and bugs to be about the transfer of nature and its self-consciousness to human self-consciousness. We are thinking of the same issues.

Eleftheria Lialios

Chicago March 7, 2017