The Fabric of Life: The Intimate Worlds of Feriancová and Kyritsopoulou

Alexandra Patterson

Petra Feriancová, In the beginning was the word and the word was water. I caught myself going on about it telling them I want to go to the sea. As if life only happened there and in the summer, 2017/2025. Embroidery on cloth, wooden hands, black gloves, 145 x 208 x 25 cm. Photograph: Richard Ivey. Courtesy of the Artist andElizabeth Xi Bauer, London

Petra Feriancová and Amanda Kyritsopoulou dig into life’s corners- pennies, shirts, receipts in their new exhibition The Fabric of Life at Elizabeth Xi Bauer Gallery, revealing that the things we dismiss as trivial can carry huge emotional weight. 

Feriancová weaves myths and memory into thoughtful arrangements of fabric and found objects, while Kyritsopoulou transforms the mundane into witty contemplations on routine, repetition, and life’s small absurdities and anxieties. With Maria do Carmo M.P. de Pontes as curator, the show thoughtfully gathers the two artists in an intimate, shared space, where flashes of life experiences seamlessly unite.  

Kyritsopoulou’s Too Close to the Ironing Board: Monday’s optimism, Tuesday’s hole (2025) presses a crumpled shirt under glass, its soft folds suspended, a fragile record of the routines and disruptions that shape daily life. The work playfully exposes how carefully made plans can fall apart, while holes in the panels tempt viewers to reach in and touch the soft fabric of memory. These are the garments in which we perform our identities, the everyday labour of being human. Sometimes they end up shoved in a closet and forgotten; here, they are pulled back into view, their imperfections laid bare. 

Amanda Kyritsopoulou, Margo wants to know how much is too much, 2021. Giclée print onarchival paper, 98 x 110 x 4 cm. Photograph: Richard Ivey. Courtesy of the Artist.

Elsewhere in the room, a plate of old pennies, meticulously counted by Feriancová’s mother and passed on for her recent trip to London, glimmers beneath a halo of gold string. Like Kyritsopoulou’s suspended shirt, it is a subtle testament to memory, care, and the small, often overlooked traces of human life. 

The exhibition is not all gentle warmth. Feriancová presents a glass Perspex box filled with murky Hogsmill River water., Inside, floats a stone-like head representing Ophelia, slowly sinking, her hand echoed by a glove clinging to the rim. Minimal and symbolic, the work is nonetheless profoundly emotive, capturing a moment of extreme vulnerability and hinting at the fragility of human life. Kyritsopoulou also explores dark anxieties in her diptych The Forensics of Seeing It Coming (2025), where a figure lies on the ground after having been struck by a large boulder- once anticipated, once unexpected. The work is both absurd and darkly witty, a reflection on life’s trials and tribulations and the precariousness of existence.  

Elsewhere, in an alcove, a broom leans beneath a charred angel crown, a relic salvaged from an arson attack on Feriancová’s home in Bratislava, acting as a kind of self-portrait, emotively suggesting hope and bold resilience. 

The exhibition highlights the value of private thought, the anxieties and reflections we carry with us. Nearby, a tapestry glows with the cryptic message: “A light that costs a thousand lira per minute to light another light and another darkness.” Here, insight is invaluable as light functioning as a metaphor to emphasise the effort required to bring understanding into being. Feriancová captures this uncertainty when she observes, “There’s no system to trust or believe,” a sentiment echoed in Kyritsopoulou’s series of installations, where receipts spill endlessly from tissue boxes mounted on plinths, forming a running transcript of her anxious reflections: “Don’t call it a disaster, call it an involuntary, immersive learning experience.” Another admits, “I’ve been good, but not as good as I could have been.” These receipts, so often crumpled and discarded, are transformed into something profound, a record of life lived amid instability and human vulnerability. 

The Fabric of Life is not about universality but intimacy. You enter the artists’ private worlds, and in doing so, you catch glimpses of our own. As Kyritsopoulou observes, even the most insignificant things have “the potential to resonate,” and here they do, revealing recollections and nostalgia, presenting the works in their rawest, most uncompromising form, yet leaving space for us to weave our own memories into them. 

'The Fabric of Life' is at Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Deptford, until October 25th 2025.