Baptism is a series of photographs capturing the artist's torso in the Aegean Sea off Agia Theodoti Bay in Ios, Cyclades. The submergence into the primordial waters of this bay, which is the ancestral village for the artist whose ancestors go back hundreds of years, represents an act of renewal or baptism into the womb of water, particularly poignant for a diaspora Hellene. The frames focus on the torso and is reminiscent of the classical statues missing limbs but also focus on the interplay of light on the folds of the chiton, harkening to the virtuosity of the folds in the flowing robes in Greek marble statuary. Likewise the series evokes baptismal rituals common in the American Baptist Revival tradition, again underscoring the dual identity of the subject. The images capture both the intimate presence of the material body in its movements in the uterus of the sea and the diachronic iterations of past bodies that are taken up to form a continuous line. The bulbous post-menopausal belly and breasts in salty water bathed in light reverberates with the energy of the Mother Goddess reminiscent of the eidola of Cycladic art so that the past and the present meld in the omphalos of water. In the background is the island of Irakleia which served as the first Cycladic cemetery where the dead were ferried and buried. Baptism therefore speaks to the cycles of life and death woven in the series of bodies from the past to the present, from the dead to the living, from the belly of the Divine feminine incarnate in the belly of the living woman, awash in the body of water from which all life emerges.
