Artist Statement

Lola Antoniou is an English Cypriot artist, who uses cultural traditions and her Greek heritage as inspiration for her work. She focuses primarily on the reinterpretation or retelling, mostly of mythology, with a strong focus on Greek mythology, life and death.  

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Antoniou utilises culture within her work as a form of creative expression, exploring her multiculturalism and identity to differentiate herself within the art world. She aims to gain a deeper understanding of her culture and what it means to her, whilst also acquainting it with others. Her work explores her relationship with divergence, experiencing life with varied perspectives due to her split culture that she translates into her work by offering people new perspectives on mythology and an insight into different cultures. 

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Antoniou is fascinated by the concept of death, being consumed by the idea in all aspects of her life, attempting to live her life with the idea that we’re all going to die anyway. Her fascination with death, reincarnation and mourning is explored through works including ‘A scene of Death’, ‘Freshly Dead’, ‘Memento Mori’ and ‘How Hades Came to Rule’. 

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Antoniou makes installations, sculptures, paintings, drawings and murals. “A scene of death”, an installation that interrogated the beauty in mourning, was inspired by the cultural traditions of The Day of The Dead, or Dia de Muertos. Antoniou built on the idea of spirits coming home to visit, and grief being something to celebrate, incorporating elements of death rituals from her Cypriot culture.  

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Antoniou makes work rooted in her Cypriot background, including paintings on the retelling of medusa’s story in the style of Greek orthodox religious icons where she combines mythological worship with religious worship. Repositioning Medusa in the context of a religious icon, Antoniou forced Medusa to be in a position of exaltation, shifting Medusa’s power to that of adoration than fear. Antoniou’s approach seeks to consider mythical figures in a contemporary guise and reimagine them and their stories through a feminist lens, forcing people to reconsider the idea of devotion.  

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Her work on death and Greek mythology helped inspire her most recent piece “How Hades Came to Rule”. Hades, God of the underworld and king of the dead, has often been depicted as ‘drawing the short straw’ when the cosmos was divided, with many believing he was ruling the forgotten. Antoniou highlights how this is a contemporary and misguided interpretation and that historically, it was believed that Hades saw this division as an honour. He wanted to rule the underworld with fairness and respect.  

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She depicts Hades’ story through a long narrative drawing using charcoal on a terracotta wall. The terracotta wall, narrative illustrations and printed Greek key all reference the Greek mythology illustrations found on Ancient Greek ceramics.  Antoniou’s decision to make the piece large scale and directly on the wall was partly influenced by the narrative artworks found within Greek Orthodox churches. 

Antoniou is primarily influenced by visual imagery, concepts and the interrogation into cultural paradigms but admires artists like Marco Mazzoni and his work on death, flora and fauna. She loves his use of colour, and the vibrancy of his coloured pencil drawings. She loves his compositional decisions, with the face often being incomplete, and how he utilises negative space within the work.  

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Antoniou is not fixated on the idea of being remembered, but is rather more concerned with, in some sort of sense, helping someone to gain a new perspective, whether that be through her daily life, or through her art. However, through her piece ‘How Hades Came to Rule’ she has started to consider the idea of preservation, experimenting with bookbinding and preserving her work in new forms.  

For Antoniou, creating art is, to put it simply, a way to creatively make her life more entertaining before her inevitable death.