Born London
BA HONS St. Martins 1983-86
MA Royal Academy 1986-90

2006/7- Ten/twelve large scale paintings based on complex characters in Shakespeare's plays..
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About Elpida

SHAKESPEARE DREAMS

An Exhibition of Paintings by Elpida Georgiou

sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust and the Department of English, School of Humanities, and Insitute of Psychiatry, Kings College London

The genesis of this exhibition was a painting I made many years ago entitled Freud Acting Hamlet. I have always been interested in Freuds analyses of Shakespeares characters, not least for his misinterpretations, of Hamlet in particular. Hamlet uses drama to accuse his uncle of the murder of his father and delivers a speech on acting to the players (who surely have rather more dramatic experience than he does). Hamlet stresses that they must not overact. I saw Freud as himself an actor, on a world stage, an actor not averse to posturing, and so, in my painting, I cast Freud as Hamlet more from intuition than analysis, but thats the way I work.

Busy with other projects, and life in general, I didnt follow this up in any systematic way until I was introduced to Gordon McMullan, Professor of Shakespeare studies at Kings College London, and to Brian Hurwitz, D'Oyly Carte Professor of Medicine & the Arts. Kings prides itself on promoting interdisciplinary studies and especially in finding ways to bring together the very different disciplines of the humanities and medical science. They were fascinated by the possibility of combining three academic disciplines - painting, literature and psychoanalysis and Gordon submitted a successful application to The Leverhulme Trust for me to become artist-in-residence of the English Department. Only writers (as you might expect in the context of an English department) had held this post before, so to bring in a visual artist was a new development and very exciting. There is great competition for this prestigious award and I felt honoured to be offered the post of artist-in-residence.

I received the Leverhulme award in the same week I was made homeless. My daughter had no secondary school to go to, and I found myself before a judge at the High Court, answering charges brought by my ex-husband. This, naturally, delayed my completion of the series. I am very grateful that Kings and the Leverhulme Trust had the patience to continue supporting my project.

My background isnt in literature: what I do is paint. Something happens inside me: I size a canvas and soon my body, brushes, paints, turps and the rest, especially my eye, are changing something, creating something which wasnt there before. The challenge was to combine my instincts with reading Shakespeares plays and their subsequent interpretations by critics of many persuasions.

One entry point is dreaming. Everyone dreams, and thats where the Unconscious makes itself most obvious (though its tricks are manifold). There are many dreamlike sequences in Shakespeare, and some psychoanalytic critics have suggested that the plays represent the dreams of his characters or even of Shakespeare himself. I doubt this: in fact, its preposterous. But it is one way into the work and, while remaining sceptical, this conceit helped my intuition bear fruit on canvas.

So I have called the exhibition Shakespeare Dreams. Its an ambiguous title. The paintings might, for instance, represent my dreams of what Shakespeare might have been dreaming. Or what you will.

Students from the English department visited my studio and many requested that I execute paintings of their favourite plays. They seemed intrigued by the concept of Shakespeares plays being interpreted in a non-verbal form. I took their ideas on board, but you cant satisfy everyone. I hope theyll be at the exhibition to see how it turned out.

Besides Hamlet, my main subjects in this exhibition are: King Lear, Lady Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Puck and Bottom in A Midsummer Nights Dream, Ophelia, Malvolio and Falstaff.

I dont like to talk about my paintings too much. That can become prescriptive and authoritarian. It is up to the viewer to create their own interpretations of what is before them. But I do like my art to be challenging. Though I have made pleasant paintings over the years, few people could live with my Lady Macbeth.

My painting of Malvolio is quite literal:

Her Cs, her Us, her Ts; and thus makes she her great Ps

Well, you know what that means. I just make Malvolios unconscious desires more explicit; and add in Lears whoreson zed, jettisoned to the floor as Malvolio spruces himself up. Does the idea that women piss still shock?

My Lear depicts the cracked king jettisoning Cordelia (as a plastic doll) over his shoulder. Hes so choleric, hes lost the plot. Some might infer the painting was influenced by my p