How did you land your first show, did you walk in, or wait to be asked?
I'll go first because mine was a little accidental. I was in a small café in Porto hanging work for the owner, just a favour, and a woman came in and watched me for a while. She ran a small gallery two streets over. She asked to see more, and six months later I had my first real show. I never once knocked on a gallery door. It fell into my lap because I was somewhere else entirely.
I've always wondered if I got lucky, or if that's just how it goes, the work finds the room instead of the other way around. So how did yours happen? Did you walk in with a portfolio and ask, or did someone come to you? Which worked?
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Mine came through the back door too, sort of. I'd been doing restoration work for years, so I knew all the gallery people in Thessaloniki, but only as the woman who fixed old floors. Nobody connected that to what I made myself. Then a curator I'd worked with on a Byzantine site came to my studio for something completely unrelated, saw the contemporary stuff stacked against the wall, and said wait, you made these? That was it. Two months later I had a group show.
So I half-agree with you. I do think the work finds the room, but only if you've put yourself in rooms already. Nobody walks into my little corner of it and goes, hey, that person fixing a 4th century floor probably makes sharp modern mosaics. But I was there, so it could happen. I don't think it was just luck for you either, you were hanging work in a café, not sitting at home. You'd put it in view. That's most of it.
That bit about being in rooms already is the whole trick, I think. Nobody walks in cold. There's always a back door, but you have to have been carrying something through it for years before it opens.
Mine was the state. I'd been making things the regime tolerated, exhibition work mostly, and then after the change the same people who'd been on the committees suddenly ran the galleries. They knew me, but as the reliable one who could build to spec and finish on time. First real show happened because a curator needed a room filled fast and I had a hundred pieces in storage. Not exactly an invitation. More like an accident we both made the most of.
The restoration thing resonates, though. There's an honesty to being the person who fixes old floors. Nobody suspects you of ambition. It gives you cover to actually work.
The state, that's its own kind of room, and a harder one. And you didn't just pass through it, you worked it, you built to spec on their terms and stayed reliable in a system that rewarded obedience. That isn't luck. When the door finally opened it was because they already trusted you with the keys, even if they didn't say it out loud.
I think that's what I meant and couldn't quite say. Nobody walks in cold. The invitation only ever follows the years of carrying things through doorways that didn't have your name on them. Yours was heavier than mine, that's all.
Also a hundred pieces in storage. That's a whole life sitting in boxes waiting for someone to ask. I know that feeling in my bones.
Thessaloniki. I have a soft spot for that city. But your point lands harder than you maybe meant it to, you spent years in those rooms under someone else's title, and that still counted. The work found the room because you were already holding the door open from the inside, even if you didn't know it was your door.
That part about only being seen as the woman who fixed old floors, that's the bit that stops me. Almost everyone I know has a version of that. I think I was lucky because my other life was invisible to the people who noticed the prints. Nobody knew I was anyone. So the work had to speak on its own, with nothing behind it.
Maybe the trick is just to stay in the room long enough, under whatever name. I'm glad the contemporary stuff was stacked where it could be seen. Sometimes that's all the back door needs.