“What interests me now is that this distinction between digital and physical is becoming increasingly unstable.”
Evangelia Dimitrakopoulou
interview by Leo Babsky
Can you give us some background on yourself and how you ended up in London?
I’m originally from Athens, where I did my BA in Sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts. The first couple of years were very traditional and technically rigorous, which gave me a strong foundation in sculptural processes that I still rely on today. My tutor Giorgos Chouliaras was instrumental in that—he really grounded me in the fundamentals of making. At the same time, I was also taught by Pantelis Chandris, who brought a much more conceptual, research-led approach. That combination—technical discipline alongside conceptual thinking—has stayed with me.
My background also plays a big role in how I work. My mother is a theologist and my father a mechanic, so I grew up between very different ways of understanding the world—one more abstract and belief-based, the other very material and hands-on.
I never fully felt settled in Athens. Working within a heavily technical field, I often felt pushed out of it, particularly because of the sexism embedded in the culture around making and fabrication; that experience weighed quite heavily, and it made me question where I could position myself.
I then applied and got accepted into the Goldsmiths MFA, which gave me space to develop the work more critically and to expand how I was thinking about it. During the first COVID lockdown, I briefly moved back to Athens, and then returned to the UK for my degree show. Shortly after that, I received the ACME Early Career Award, which made it possible to stay and continue building a life here.
Since then, I’ve been based in London. Alongside my practice, I work in the 3D Make workshops at Central Saint Martins as an assistant technician, supporting students across a wide range of disciplines.
What does a typical day (or night) in the studio usually look like for you? I know you also have a full time job and I think it’s helpful to hear how working artists balance art making with regular, paid work especially in a city as expensive as London.
I do work a full-time job, so most of my making happens either before my shifts in the university workshops or after work, depending on energy levels. Weekends are when I can spend longer in the studio, and I try to keep at least one day to be at home with my partner, otherwise it becomes unsustainable quite quickly.
Balancing a full-time job with maintaining a practice is definitely a challenge. It requires being very aware of your time and not overextending yourself. There’s also a reality to working in a city like London where this balance is necessary, and it can sometimes feel like having the time and space to fully dedicate yourself to making is still tied to privilege.
At the same time, I feel very lucky that my job is directly connected to what I do. I teach how to work with materials, sculpture, and design in the workshops, and that has become a big part of my practice as well. The transfer of skills and knowledge is not separate from making—it feeds into it. I’m constantly sharing what I know, but also learning through that process, both from teaching and from the people around me.
Because of that, I’ve had to adapt the way I work. I tend to think in longer timelines and build projects that can develop gradually. It’s less about producing constantly and more about maintaining continuity. You have to be strategic—choosing when to push and when to step back—otherwise burnout is very real.
It’s not an ideal balance, but it’s a working one. It allows the practice to keep evolving while staying grounded in a structure that supports it.
There is a deep connection to craft in terms of the way you carve, model or weld your materials which links your practice to “traditional” sculpture yet your vocabulary is often drawn from digital landscapes and online fantasy worlds , is this a way of questioning our experience of living in an increasingly virtual age?
There is a connection to craft in the way I work, but I don’t see it as separate from the digital—it’s more that the two operate in parallel and constantly interfere with each other. Processes like welding, fabricating, and assembling are very physical and time-based. They require negotiation with weight, balance, heat, resistance. Things don’t behave perfectly, and that lack of control becomes part of the work rather than something to eliminate.
At the same time, a lot of the formal language comes from digital environments—3D modeling, gaming aesthetics, speculative or fantasy worlds. These spaces produce forms that feel seamless, highly controlled, almost inevitable. They operate within their own logic, where gravity, failure, or material fatigue don’t apply in the same way. When I translate that into sculpture, there is always a rupture. The form has to confront weight, tension, structural limits. It can’t remain purely virtual.
What interests me now is that this distinction between digital and physical is becoming increasingly unstable. It’s not just that we move between the two—it’s that we are starting to question both. With AI-generated images, deepfakes, and synthetic media, there is a growing uncertainty around what we are actually seeing. Even something real can be perceived as artificial. That doubt becomes part of perception itself.
So the issue is not only that the digital mediates reality, but that it destabilizes trust in it. We are constantly filtering what we see, trying to verify, decode, or question it. That process becomes exhausting, but also automatic. It feeds into a broader condition where certainty is difficult to locate.
This connects to how I think about information more generally. I often describe it as something closer to vapor or sound—something that moves through you rather than something you can fully contain. We absorb images, narratives, and data continuously, and they shape how we think, often without us being fully aware of it. That’s where the idea of metabolization comes in. Information is not just consumed, it becomes part of the body.
Digital systems intensify this. Content circulates quickly, mutates, and spreads through networks in a way that resembles contagion. Ideas stabilize through repetition rather than verification. At the same time, these systems are structured—filtered by algorithms, influenced by power, and often reinforcing existing hierarchies.
So bringing together craft and digital language is not about contrasting something “real” with something “virtual.” It’s more about working within that instability. Craft introduces resistance, time, and physical consequence. The digital introduces speed, abstraction, and a kind of disembodied control. When they meet, the work exposes where those systems don’t fully align.
That tension reflects how we experience the world now—moving between embodied reality and mediated perception, while constantly questioning both. The work sits in that gap, where something that appears stable or believable starts to shift, and where certainty is never fully guaranteed.
I read you have used scent based elements in your works, can you tell me some more about this and the emotions you hope to evoke in the viewer through this medium?
Scent is very important in my work because it operates differently from the other senses. It doesn’t sit at the top of a hierarchy like vision does—it’s often considered secondary or overlooked—but at the same time it’s probably the most primal sense we have. It goes directly through the body. You don’t process it in a detached way; it immediately affects memory, emotion, and physical response.
What interests me is that smell doesn’t ask for permission. It’s invasive in a very particular way. You can choose not to look at something, you can close your ears to a certain extent, but scent infiltrates. It enters through breath, through the body, and it’s very difficult to control that interaction. That “rudeness” is something I work with. It creates a kind of forced intimacy between the work and the viewer.
In my dissertation Ghosts + Perfumes, I was thinking about how information and power operate in similar ways to scent—diffused, atmospheric, difficult to locate, but very effective in shaping behavior and perception. I describe information almost like a vapor: something that permeates us without clear boundaries. You don’t always know when you’ve absorbed it, but it still affects how you think and feel. Scent makes that process tangible.
It’s also deeply personal. The smell of machine oil or metal polish immediately takes me back to my father, uncle and grandfather coming home from work. Now I encounter that same smell daily in my own workspace, so there’s a loop between past and present. Bergamot reminds me of my grandmother’s Greek sweets, lavender and jasmine of my mother and her flowers. There is even a very specific smell on my grandmother’s balcony that still carries the trace of my grandfather’s sweat. These are not abstract references—they are direct, physical connections. Smell makes memory unavoidable.
Because of that, it forces a pause. When you recognize a smell, you instinctively try to locate it, to understand where it’s coming from. It activates storytelling. You begin to build connections, even if they’re fragmented or unclear. That’s something I’m interested in—how meaning forms through association rather than instruction.
At the same time, scent is very easy to manipulate because it taps into the psyche so directly. It can produce comfort or discomfort almost instantly, without explanation. That makes it a powerful tool, but also an unstable one. I don’t use it to communicate something fixed. It’s more about shifting the atmosphere of a space, altering how the body relates to it.
There’s also a connection to ideas of contagion. Smell spreads, lingers, attaches itself to bodies and environments. In that sense, it behaves like information—circulating, mutating, influencing without always being visible. It’s not contained, and it doesn’t stay in one place. So rather than evoking a specific emotion, scent allows me to create a condition—something slightly invasive, familiar but also disorienting.
Who are your favorite emerging Greek artists right now ?
I’m a big fan of what’s happening around KEIV Athens at the moment. It’s not just one artist, but a whole ecosystem of practice. It was founded by Konstantinos Lianos, who studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts and set up KEIV as an artist-run space hosting exhibitions and projects .
The people behind it, like Miltos Digkas and Lianos himself, are producing crazy strong work. What I find compelling is how fluid their practice is—it moves between sculpture, jewelry, installations, and collaborative projects without trying to fix itself into one category. There’s a kind of rawness and immediacy in what they do, but also a very considered approach to form and material. It feels quite direct, but at the same time very aware of context—both locally in Athens and more broadly.
I’m drawn to that way of working because it doesn’t separate disciplines or hierarchies. It treats different outputs—objects, spaces, collaborations—as part of the same language. It feels fresh, but also grounded in making, not just concept.
At the same time, I’m also drawn to practices that sit slightly outside what we would traditionally call “art.” For example, the design duo made by Astronauts, founded by Danae Dasyra and Joe Bradford, who are based in Athens. Their work focuses on sculptural objects produced through industrial processes like hydroforming, where metal is shaped using pressurized water.
What I find interesting there is how they bring together digital processes and very hands-on fabrication. The forms feel almost anatomical or organism-like, but they come from industrial techniques and controlled systems. It’s that collision—between precision and something more bodily or fluid—that I relate to.
And finally do you have any exciting projects coming up that you would like to tell us about?
Nothing formally announced yet, but I’m in a phase where things are accumulating quite quickly. I’m working towards expanding the scale and complexity of what I do—both materially and spatially. That means testing new fabrication processes, pushing structural limits, and thinking more seriously about how works can occupy and affect space rather than sit within it.
I’m also interested in building more collaborative and interdisciplinary projects, especially where different forms of knowledge and making intersect—whether that’s through technical processes, shared skills, or collective production. Teaching feeds into that quite a lot, so that exchange is something I want to develop further.
At the moment it’s less about presenting a finished outcome and more about setting up the conditions for something larger to happen. It’s a period of groundwork, but with a clear sense that it’s leading somewhere more expanded.