“Come on in. Let me show you my ‘Dowry,’” artist Nikos Iosif quipped as he welcomed me into his workshop just a few months after hitting one of the most important milestones of his career. The “Dowry” he referred to was a series of textile art which he had been showing at a local gallery in his native Thessaloniki during the spring, when he learned that he had been selected from among 1,300 applicants for the Contextile – Contemporary Textile Art Biennial, which has been taking place in Guimaraes in Portugal since 2012.
During my tour of his workshop in the arty up-and-coming neighborhood of Dodeka Apostoloi in central Thessaloniki I noticed piles of colorful textiles, scraps of material and handwoven pieces that once decorated someone’s home or sat in a young woman’s dowry chest – the kindling that stokes Iosif’s imagination and his textile collages. No surprise then that he called the series he will be showing in Portugal, “Dowry,” a collection of pieces casting light on “a world between the past (similar to that, perhaps, which we remember from our grandmothers) and the future; a world that is tangible, full of warm matter and craftsmanship, but also of memory,” according to art historian Areti Leopoulou. Iosif became interested in textile art quite accidentally after two painful breakups left him with a pile of clothes, linen and textiles that became the primary material of a new path in his artistic trajectory.
He regarded them as a canvas r.