ARTIST STATEMENT

A-R-T-REE is a visual inquiry into the dynamic relationship between structure and growth, where printmaking practices and spatial form converge to reframe our perception of environment, memory, and time. Rooted in my ongoing engagement with the material traces of both urban and natural landscapes, this body of work investigates how surfaces carry histories—layered narratives shaped by human intervention and organic transformation. The title AR-T-REE operates as a conceptual hinge between artistic creation and the organic metaphor of the tree. It evokes branching systems, interconnectedness, and processes of continual change. Within this framework, linear and geometric structures coexist with fluid, gestural marks, forming a visual dialogue that reflects the tension between the constructed and the living. These formal contrasts become a means of articulating how order and unpredictability, control and growth, coexist within shared environments. Employing techniques grounded in printmaking—woodcut, lithography, etching, and serigraphy—alongside layered materials with architectural resonance, I seek to reveal the latent memories embedded in matter. The works function as spatial and perceptual fields, inviting viewers into a contemplative engagement with time: how memory accumulates in physical form, and how personal and collective narratives intersect within place. Individual works within the AR-T-REE series explore distinct yet interconnected dimensions of this inquiry. Ladder of Change addresses transition and evolution, transforming the tree into a structure of ascent where repetition becomes a rhythm of memory and verticality suggests movement between past and future. Tree of Life approaches the tree as an archetype of continuity and regeneration, its branching forms acting as traces of lived experience and vital energy. In Tree of Knowledge, the tree becomes a system of recording and reading, where layered lines articulate knowledge as an evolving, collective process. Tree of Light foregrounds transparency and perception, treating light as an active force that reveals form and connects material presence with immaterial experience. Through AR-T-REE, I aim to create spaces of reflection that bridge past and present, form and perception, inviting a renewed awareness of continuity within the ever-changing landscapes of everyday life. Marina Maravelaki, 2020

My artistic practice emerges from a deep engagement with urban space, materiality, memory, and the dialogues between past and present. Through printmaking, mixed media constructions, and sculptural installations, I explore how environments—both natural and built—shape our experience of place, history, and collective consciousness. I am driven by a fascination with the poetics of materials: recycled aluminum, plexiglass, old wood, and printed surfaces become more than mediums—they are carriers of cultural, architectural, and emotional presence. By reconfiguring these elements into layered compositions and spatial forms, I seek to reveal overlooked narratives and to emphasize the interconnectedness of human activity and material existence. My work often reflects on the tensions of consumer culture and perpetual waste, while advocating for the latent value within reused and repurposed materials.  My compositions function as constructions of time and space, where geometrical rigor meets organic gestures, inviting viewers to inhabit and contemplate the thresholds between solidity and transparency, memory and transformation. Through this process, I aim to create environments that not only evoke the presence of architectural monuments and urban landscapes but also offer reflections on how we perceive, inhabit, and reinterpret our surroundings in an era of rapid change. Rooted in traditional printmaking techniques and expanded through experimental assemblies, my work aspires to bridge drawing, sculpture, and spatial narrative—encouraging a sustained visual dialogue that resonates with personal and collective histories. 
Marina Maravelaki, 2018

My art work is a journey in monuments, buildings, areas, cities, like Rethymno, Athens, Boston, New York, Tokio, Havana, San Miguel de Allente… countries, like Saudi Arabia, Spain, Argentina, Cuba, Tunisia, Mexico, U.S.A., Greece … that they focus on my desire to share the beauty and the mystery that surrounding them. The viewer is encouraged to enter the area of the monument and to feel the atmosphere, the history, the philosophy of the people who live, lived, used and continue to use it as a sacred means of habitat, or site of work, or meditation place, or entertainment hall, or education space or sport institute. It is a tour of urban space, where a combination of rigor and freedom of performance is presented, one that intervenes in the contents of the building structure using geometric and organic elements, as well as an incessant transformation of the form that translates the timelessness of the building, or a report on the four seasons, sometimes an investigation of the experiential approach, in other cases a creative recording of buildings from antiquity to modern times, which they set an art environment with playful tendency. The present structures are constructed with plexiglas cut in different levels and shapes with prints. My prints are Woodcuts, Lithographs, Etchings and Serigraphs on paper and plexiglas.
Marina Maravelaki, 2014 – 2015

“What is the destiny of a home that gets old?”
The “Bird nests” present the rivalries between ancient and modern world and of human desire. Their structure goes with the time and the place where they act. They are presented as a game. It is a place in rivalry to established ideas. It is a moving system of beings not restricted of anything and not attached to anything. It is a total of creatures of which the basic lines of prospective are the information, the opinion and a reference to four seasons, talking about environmental phenomena and a material connected to recycling and is contradictory to our senseless consumptions behavior.
It is a classic already subject that man faces because he is not concerned with coexistence but with his will.
A Phenomenon.
A Hypothetical Example.
A Creature of his Imagination.
A given thing, another world, another planet that summarizes that principles and tries to find proofs explanations putting a lot of questions…
It is important the way, each one, faces his destiny.
Marina Maravelaki, 2012

“Good Morning Athens!”
A nonchalant stroll of images and urban experiences that form an ever-changing game of epochs, days and months through the use of geometric and also organic architectural elements. Signs of life with objects that highlight the different function of each building, at different phases of time. Trend for lifting and fixation. Confrontations of materials and symbols. Character dreaming and organizational simultaneously. A search on the paths of urban space that refers to a mystical character of the building – of the city. Dynamic atmosphere resulting from the pointed reconstruction of buildings with monumental character and strict design performance, but also their lyrical, and atmospheric approach, emanating from the warm color palette and transparencies of materials. A story without end characterized by experimentation, optical illusions, successions of architectural styles, but also musicality. The philosophy of change, reflected in buildings, implies changing the past in the present and the future as a mirror of our nature and life.                                                                                                                                                                      
Good Morning Athens! – Good Night Athens!
Images of Athens during the day and night
Images of Athens in diferent seasons, days and months
Images of Athens through her buildings
Images of Athens through my eyes
Images of Athens through my present and past experiences
Images of Athens through of cultural symboles
Images of Athens as in my dreams
Marina Maravelaki, 2008