Work in progress
From Your Eyes to Mine;
—Baby, do you think Persephone was very young when Hades abducted her?
—Baby, what kind of question is that!? How could you ever ask the age of a god’s child?
—You’re right, what audacity of me! Am I out of my mind?
—In Above, when one witnesses, somewhere around the 2000s CE, in the lands of Mesopotamia, the last glance of a bride who is so clearly still a child before she’s placed into the car to be taken to her new home after a three-day, three-night wedding—one can’t help but ask, almost by reflex…
—Baby, do you think Persephone was very young when Hades abducted her?
—Baby, what kind of question is that!? How could you ever ask the age of a god’s child?
—You’re right, what audacity of me! Am I out of my mind?
—In Above, when one witnesses, somewhere around the 2000s CE, in the lands of Mesopotamia, the last glance of a bride who is so clearly still a child before she’s placed into the car to be taken to her new home after a three-day, three-night wedding—one can’t help but ask, almost by reflex…
...
-Could Demeter, in this story, be considered the first climate activist as she sets out to find her daughter?
-Within the framework of the Hades–Zeus pact, how is patriarchy conveyed through myths at its core?
-If Persephone hadn’t been abducted by Hades, if she had the chance to live constantly on the surface, would she, unlike a bipolar person, have been unable to experience the cycles of summer and winter?
-And according to the myth, was it the three or five pomegranate seeds she ate that made Persephone resemble a bipolar being, or was it Hades’s selfishness?
-Finally, what about the unchangeable laws of the underworld, or the working conditions of the modern world? Where do they stand within this story?
In The Monologue That Blooms Under and Above, the artist reinterprets the myth of Persephone and Demeter through the medium of freehand machine embroidery. The work situates itself at the intersection of mythology, gender, and psychological states, exploring how ancient narratives continue to shape the symbolic language of womanhood and agency.
Drawing upon a series of dialogues that question the abduction of Persephone, the myth is reframed not as a divine tale of seasonal change, but as an inquiry into the structures of patriarchy, trauma, and cyclical survival. Through textile, a traditionally feminized and domestic material, the artist subverts the boundaries between craft and narrative, translating myth into a tactile form of resistance and remembrance.
The embroidery process, guided by the artist’s hand yet mediated through the mechanical rhythm of the sewing machine, becomes a metaphor for negotiation between control and surrender, consciousness and instinct. The stitched surface, both fragile and assertive, mirrors the psychological terrain of Persephone: oscillating between descent and return, silence and expression, darkness and bloom.
By invoking the timeless dialogue between “above” and “below,” the work questions contemporary socio-ecological and existential conditions, those unchangeable laws of the underworld and the labor systems of the modern world. In doing so, The Monologue That Blooms Under and Above becomes not merely a reflection on myth, but a living monologue that continues to unfold through each thread, each repetition, each act of searching.