Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2023 - Student interview - 09. Xanthe Condoleon

XANTHE CONDOLEON: Hi, my name is Xanthe Condoleon. And I studied visual arts at Abbotsleigh. So this is my body of work. It's called Fearless Flight, and it's within the printmaking medium. It was initially inspired by the story of Icarus, which kind of refers to a Greek myth where Icarus flew too close to the sun after being given a pair of wax wings from his father. And his ambition kind of got the best of him, and his wax wings melted, and he plunged into the sea and fell to his death.

And this kind of myth has always been connected to me because it's something that my yaya would tell me being of Greek heritage. It was very close to our family. But I kind of interpreted it differently in Year 12 because I was so kind of caught up by the pressure of Year 12 and the perfectionism that I placed on myself to achieve the best that I could. And I was feeling as though I was burning out.

And so I kind of used this as a metaphor that kind of guided me and acted as a warning for me to kind of slow down and recognise when I needed to prioritise my mental health as opposed to perfectionism. Within the initial stages of researching and kind of preparing initial ideas and draughts of what I was thinking of doing, I spent a lot of time researching different artists, especially printmakers such as Dianne Fogwell and Martin King.

I really appreciated their natural imagery and especially King's kind of bird prints and how he did these kind of symmetrical bird prints. I really resonated with that and found it quite beautiful but simultaneously moving and very deeply conceptual. And so I kind of wanted to pay homage to them within my own body of work. So as I said, I'm in the printmaking medium. But within that medium I kind of explored very many different techniques and practices.

I initially started with drypoint etching. So I was deciding whether I wanted to do lino or drypoint. But I ultimately decided drypoint because I felt that I could be a little bit more refined and detailed, and it was something that I enjoyed more. So I started with this etching plate here, which took me about 5 months. I started it in the summer holidays and it wasn't in December. And it wasn't until April that I was actually able to finish it because of all of the intricate lines and how long it took to properly etch it.

And I had to be very careful because it's hard to make mistakes and kind of come back from that. And then I decided that I wanted to do relief printing. Really gross, but I was at the beach one day, and I saw some feathers. And I was like, oh yeah, this could be interesting to play around with. So I made sure I washed them, but I also ordered a couple of feathers online. And I rolled ink onto them, put them on a sheet of paper, ran them through the printing press, and they gave me these really beautiful relief prints.

And I kind of experimented with that. And then eventually, my teacher and I decided that it would be amazing if we did this really large scale wing made from the relief prints of feathers. And there was a lot of experimentation within that because it was so hard to get a perfect wing print. And funnily enough, these were all of the experimentation prints from the feathers trying to make a wing. So they were initially dud prints. I kind of put them to the side.

And then I produced this, which I was really happy with. And then on the laser cutter, I kind of made sure to cut around it really refinely. And then I ended up actually using these because my teacher kind of saw them and was like, what are they doing? And I was like, oh, they're just, they were practice. And she said, how about we experiment with them and see what we can do and make a really abstract kind of unit of work?

With this one, we decided to dip it in wax just to get that conceptual meaning across even further about how Icarus's wings were made from wax, and they obviously melted. And then these wings here were done on the laser cutter. I was up till probably 4:00 AM on my laptop trying to draw these really intricate lines in Adobe. And then I went onto the laser cutter, and it took about 6 hours to print them all together.

Funny story, these burns here were actually an accident. I was sitting at the laser cutter, and all of a sudden, it caught on fire. And I had no idea what to do. And then I was really stressed thinking that I'd had to redo it because that would be about 6 hours, again of my time. And then I kind of was talking to my teacher and was like, wait, this actually really works with my concept. It really gets my meaning across. It adds a bit of an extra layer. It's more sophisticated. And it kind of is more cohesive and it brings the Unit together more.

So with this wing, it didn't actually catch on fire. So I went and got a match and I just in my bedroom, kind of did some burning in that one as well. And then with these ones, the main feedback I got from my teachers kind of for my trial major work was that not enough of the story was coming through. So with these prints, what we did is we tried to do some kind of blue wash at the bottom to kind get through the idea of the ocean.

And we wanted it to look like a progression of wax melting into the ocean and the wax here kind of falling into the ocean like that. And I also decided to do a book, which was a very late minute decision. But I really wanted to further get through the message of the narrative and the story of Icarus. As you notice at the top of the body of work, there's kind of this flip book, which my teacher and I decided to do in the final stages of the major work just to bring the whole story together.

Because ultimately, the myth of Icarus is a narrative, and it does have mythological ties that I really wanted to emphasise within my body of work. So I had a lot of dud prints, really large scale dud prints. And my teacher and I didn't really know what to do with them. But I decided that I wanted to make a book in the wing shape, and she kind of looked at me and was like, that's going to be impossible. There's no way that the binding is going to work.

But we spent some really late nights in the art studio, and we kind of worked out the best way to do it. So we very much so DIYed it. We used leather. We used matte board. We used a lot of glue. And then using the laser cutter, I etched the story of Icarus onto each page so that while it's displayed as kind of like an installation piece at the moment, you can actually flip through the pages and read the story and really immerse yourself within the myth of Icarus just to kind get through the whole concept even further.

The visual arts process diary really helped me to consolidate my ideas. Every time I had a new idea, I would make sure that I wrote it down. And especially I would make sure to write down the reason for my shift in idea because I didn't want to kind of feel like I was just changing for the sake of it. I wanted to have a very strong and meaningful reason that I was taking a new direction within my artwork.

And it was so kind of important to the process that I would flick through my visual arts process diary, see something that an idea or just like a print that I had done within the initial stages of my body of work and kind of dug it up and went, oh yeah, I could do something with this. And a lot of what you see here was actually the prints were done really early on when I didn't even know my final concept. I was kind of just mucking around in the studio and kind of decided that I could do something with what I had.

I would say the biggest advice that I could give to Year 12 students is definitely to trust the process and kind of rely on the fact that you are constantly evolving within the formation of your body of work. You are constantly learning new skills, creating new pieces of work that you will find revolutionary and innovative ways to use later on in the process. I had no idea what my final body of work was going to look like. And I felt very anxious about that.

And my teacher kind of, she sat me down, and she was like, you can't be stressed about that. You just need to keep producing work, keep experimenting. I experimented with the relief. I experimented with the laser cutter. I made a book. That was very kind of like unconventional printmaking, but we kind of pushed the boundaries of what constituted printmaking. And we ended up creating a very diverse but simultaneously cohesive piece of work.

So definitely do not put pressure on yourselves from the beginning to have an image of your major work laid out in front of you, and you're always working towards that image. It's going to chop and change inevitably. And if it doesn't, then you're not properly evolving with your body of work.

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