sofia papadopoulou

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Projects

My artistic practice operates at the intersection of architecture, craft, and visual poetry. Central to my work is the fold, not as a technical skill, but as a language and mode of thinking through which material acquires rhythm, memory, and tension. Origami functions as a system of internal geometry, informing wearable objects and artist books that unfold onto the body and into space as portable maps of experience. In my painting practice, fluid acrylics move autonomously, recording time, gravity, and chance as topographic traces. Across all media, my work preserves the trace of gesture, allowing form to remain open, mutable, and charged with experience.

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Folds of Memory – Collars

2015-2022, mixed techniques (origami, kirigami, paper, rose petals)Paper becomes a vessel of memory: both fragile and indelible. Through collage and origami, the works compose landscapes where the constructed meets the spontaneous, and form emerges through constraint.
Each fold is a gesture of transformation; each tear, a trace of forgetting. The material, seemingly humble, is transformed into a mapping of inner processes, into a poetic exercise in embracing instability.

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le voleurs

2018, performance, origami, kirigami"The performers where gathered, kai the whole village came to welcome the little saltimbags. The jester with a gentle inclination invited visitors to admire the white lily's acrobatics, seek their fate from the carnations, while the little jasmine played his accordion, accompanying with it;s music the whole performance."
Artist, little saltimbags. A cast based on an amorphous mass of dreamlust, psychopathy, sensitivity and excessive brain function. You give a form, but she is the master. An unnecessary continuing slavery, which is the only one that accepts to place any of your responsibilities on it, but also the only one that requires each cell of your mental mass. Two undefined natures are fighting each other, eternally codependent in the context of life.
External observers benefit. Like clowns in children's parties, the little saltybang is invited to be exhibited, bringing as an uninvited guest his or her Chimera . No one understands it, it is commonplace to deride it, but they surely seek her with zeal to delight yjeir own flat reality.
In the 6th century BC century, it was discovered that the Earth is not flat.

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liar liar pants on folding

2025, performance, origami, kirigamiThe work emerged from the observation of gestures of protection and the desire for concealment traced in the psychic bodies of people outside my planetary system. It takes the form of a construction made of rice paper that transforms from hood to shell, from cover to filter. When opened, it wraps around the body and restricts the gaze forward and downward, as if entering a small, private screen.Rice paper does not block light; it allows it to pass gently, like breath. It creates a space of semi-light, where nothing is fully visible and nothing entirely hidden. Here, the sense of “inside” and “outside” becomes blurred.“I pretend to hide within my shell, yet the light betrays me” forms the conceptual core of the work. I simulate withdrawal while, in reality, I expose myself through a new kind of transparency, one that does not reveal but suggests.The work becomes an exercise in intimacy and distance, a space where the act of hiding is transformed into an act of seeing. It occupies a moment between visibility and protection, between pretense and revelation, within the very light that was thought to offer concealment.

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mikrotopia

2018-today, photographyMicrotopia is a poetic exercise in observation, where the camera and voice reveal what is usually unseen. Through intense zoom-ins on blossoms, natural detail transforms into an inner landscape, a small universe of textures, pulses, and shadows.
Language operates in parallel with image: poems composed of verbal fragments are reassembled, just as the flowers are stripped of the familiar. The result is a field of fragments, a sensorial experience where sound becomes silence and looking becomes touch.
Each video is a form of focus: not a withdrawal, but a plunge into the imperceptible. In opposition to speed and the excess of information, the work invites a slow gaze, an existential observation of the insignificant, which becomes a core of emotional resonance.

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Blossomings of the Useless: Sculptographies of the Fleeting

2025, Plaster, plant molds – Work in progressA theory of relativity of the minimal is born from the silence of the “useless” things, those that, just as they bloom, vanish. The plaster casts of flowers act as personal fossils of memory: traces of a fragile brightness that insists on being preserved.
The flower, an “ephemeral being of light,” as Jung called it, is captured at the moment of its transition. The plaster mold does not merely record form, but a moment suspended between the transient and the eternal. The organic and the inorganic coexist in a relief that resembles an archaeological artifact, a testimony from an immaterial civilization.
This act becomes a gesture of remembrance: that even the most elusive element, a petal, the veining of a leaf, holds cosmic weight. At the threshold between matter and meaning, I seek a form for that which is destined not to remain.

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Quadratic Logic

2018-2025,Square artist books, 21 × 21 cm, unfolding to form a square arrangement.The work constitutes an attempt to architect the formless space of information, a flooding and dreamlike substance that extends both within and beyond reality. At its core stands the square, not as a mere shape but as a logical condition, a discipline, a preparatory grid.
Form emerges from a square logic, a calculation that resists the irrational without negating it. Dream intertwines with geometry; information rising from the dream journal is traced within the anthology and inscribed as raw material for a personal vocabulary.
The works take the form of black square artist books, each autonomous and self-contained, yet designed to expand multiplicatively. When placed together, they once again form a unified square, a return to structure, a reminder that even the chaotic mind seeks geometric symmetry.
Here, the square is not static. It becomes a carrier of movement, a kaleidoscopic labyrinth of folds, silences, pathways, and whispers. The viewer-reader is invited to navigate a cerebral field, an exercise in orientation without destination. At its core lies the premonition of a Minotaur, an invisible presence that remains unknown, enigmatic, yet familiar.
The search is perpetual, and the architecture of form guarantees no revelation. Yet the discipline of the square, the systematic nature of folding, and the insistence on gesture generate a personal mechanism of remembrance: a map of the inner world, where each trace is a path and each surface a question.

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One arm

2018-2025, origami, origami, kirigami
Inspired by Kawabata's "one arm"can let you have one of my arms for the night," said the girl. She took off her right arm at the shoulder and, with her left hand, laid it on my knee.
"Thank you." I looked at my knee. The warmth of the arm came through.

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Wooden Logos (Space)

Wooden origami with hinges, painted with acrylicSeemingly opposing forces can be complementary and interdependent in the natural world. One can give rise to the other through their mutual connection. Such a duality creates a dynamic system—an integrated whole that is more significant than its individual complementary forces. Shadow cannot exist without light, nor light without darkness. The balance between these opposites, with each containing a trace of the other—the white bearing an element of black—shapes the form as it enters into dialogue with the environment in which it exists.

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Teetotum, my eros

Love like a teetotum—small, fragile, accidental.
It spins between the fingers, like a game of chance. Each rotation is a possibility. Each fold of the paper, an inward folding of the self.The series Teetotum, my eros intervenes by hand in the pages of Dickens’s classic Great Expectations, creating delicate origami forms—like emotions that unfold and refold within the narrative. Just as Dickens’s hero hovers between desire and disappointment, here the material of the book is transformed into something new: poetic, temporary, playful, and sacred at once.The teetotum, this childhood spinning top of fate, becomes a symbol of love: it spins, trembles, loses its balance, at times bringing victory, at others loss. Paper—sometimes cut, sometimes folded—embodies the fragile nature of expectations, the fine line between meaning and abstract beauty.Love, here, is not certainty.
It is a spinning top that never stops exactly where you want it to.

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The Box

Writing and construction of an artist book“…and somewhere along the way, things became confused. Where the sky began and where the sea ended was no longer clear. And no one knew whether we were meant to fly or to drown.”

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Paintings

2023, 1.80 m × 1.20 m, acrylics and resin on wood
2019, 1.00 m * 1.00 m, acrylis on canvas
2022, 0.35m*0.70m , acrylics on wood

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Cultural and Educational Workshops

I design and facilitate educational workshops and learning programs that use art, architecture, and visual storytelling as tools for exploration, creativity, and critical thinking. My work focuses on creating meaningful, hands-on learning experiences for children and adolescents, adapted to different age groups, educational contexts, and abilities.
Drawing from my background in architecture, illustration, and cultural education, I develop workshops that encourage participants to observe, imagine, build, draw, question, and collaborate. Each program is conceived as a space for experimentation, where learning happens through making, discussion, and active engagement with visual and spatial ideas.
I have designed and led both independent and commissioned workshops, working with schools, cultural institutions, and public audiences. My approach places strong emphasis on inclusion, accessibility, and experiential learning, informed by professional training in special education and long-term work with diverse groups of children and teenagers.

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Book illustrations

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About

I am an architect (National Technical University of Athens), visual artist, and cultural educator, working at the intersection of art, architecture, education, and visual storytelling. I have illustrated more than 50 children’s books (Metaihmio Publications, Kedros Publications, Psihogios Publications), including an award-winning nonfiction title( Greek National Book Award for Knowledge 2021, Cyprus National Book Award for Knowledge 2013, Cyprus National Book Award for Knowledge 2011), while several of my works have been shortlisted for national book awards in Greece and Cyprus.
My practice focuses on the design and delivery of educational programs, workshops, and learning experiences for children and adolescents, drawing on art, architecture, and spatial thinking as tools for knowledge, imagination, and critical engagement. I have collaborated with cultural and public institutions, including the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT3), and have professional training in special education, with a strong interest in inclusive and accessible cultural education.
Through an interdisciplinary approach, I translate complex cultural, artistic, and spatial concepts into meaningful, playful, and participatory experiences, aiming to connect diverse audiences with art, culture, and learning in thoughtful and engaging ways.

Artistic Statement

My work explores transience, loss, and displacement through fragile forms and quiet traces. I am interested in what almost escapes: cracks, imprints, and material remnants that insist on being seen. Observation is central to my practice — a gaze that remains rather than consumes.Working between architecture, craft, and visual poetry, I approach the fold as both form and language. Origami is not decoration but a system of geometry and rhythm. Through collars, neckpieces, and handmade objects, folds unfold onto the body and into space like portable maps, becoming traces of time.Alongside this, I create artist books inspired by literature and work with fluid abstract painting, allowing matter to move freely and record gesture and gravity. Across all my practices, I seek forms that carry the memory of action. The fold remains my point of departure.

Nominations & Awards

• The Big… Small Ones: The Scientists (2021)
– Awarded with the State Award for Knowledge Books, Greece• Labyrinth and the Minotaur (2015), Metaihmio publications
– Shortlisted for the State Award for Knowledge Books, Greece• Am I an Idiot? (2014)
– Shortlisted for the State Literary Awards, Greece• I’m Not a Monster, I’m Telling You (2011), Kedros publications
– Shortlisted for the State Literary Awards, Greece
– State Award for Children’s Literature, Republic of Cyprus
– Commendation from the Greek Children’s Book Circle
– Shortlisted for the “Diavazo” Magazine Awards, Greece• Eftychios Kallergis and the Collection of Nightmares (2013), Psihogios publications
– State Award for Children’s Literature, Republic of Cyprus• Mysteries, Secrets and Magic in the Big City (2012), Psihogios publications
– Shortlisted for the State Literary Awards, Greece

collaborations

• Museum of Modern Ceramics
• Sporos Productions (ERT3)
• Metaihmio Publishers
• Psyhogios Publishers
• Kedros Publishers
• Aikaterini Laskaridi Foundation Library
• Municipal Library of the Municipality of Kallithea
• Municipal Library of the Municipality of Alimos
• Collaboration with various private tutoring centers, providing structured preparation for the Greek national university entrance exams

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Contact me for any further information

[email protected]