Mudhouse Residency, Agios Ioannis, Greece
For centuries, the Tyrian purple pigment was valued at three times the price of gold. Sourced from snails in the Mediterranean Sea, legend has it the pigment was discovered when Hercules' dog’s mouth turned bright purple after chewing on a snail. Large factories were subsequently built to produce the dye, and the stench of putrifying snails could be smelled for miles. The color came to be associated with royalty until 1856, when a synthetic alternative was accidentally discovered during an attempt to create quinine, an anti-malarial drug.
While researching the history of the pigment in Crete at the Mudhouse Residency in 2024, I created a revisionist version of the story, where class struggle is carried out at the level of the sea snails, who were known to be cannibalistic and thus self-annihilating before they could be harvested for pigment.
A paralell body of work was sourced from imagery found at the base of the Morosini Fountain, built in 1628 to bring water to the city of Heraklion. Its panels are embossed with mythological depictions of maritime figures.
The resulting body of paintings were assembled in handmade artist frames and exhibited in Agios Ionnis, Crete and in Bon Voyage, 3A Gallery, New York, NY.