Artist Statement
Hi! My name is Kika, and I am a Contemporary Patternist from London.
I create through Contemporary Patternism - a term I coined referring to an asymmetrically layered process of taking a shape and walking with an emotion, allowing patterns to emerge and evolve into unexpected compositions. My work includes colourful paper collages, paintings, prints, and textiles - each piece a translation of inner experience into visible form, where the rhythms of nature and the landscapes of the inner world meet.
Growing up in a Greek Cypriot family, I learned from my grandmother, a refugee, that art can be a sanctuary during difficult times. When I lost my father in 2017, art became a way to process grief, reconnect with joy, and explore the invisible through colour, form, and rhythm.
Through each piece, I transform personal and emotional experiences into vibrant patterns—turning the unseen into something tangible, playful, and healing. My work is a reminder of connection: between sorrow and joy, between self and others, and between the visible and the invisible.
For a deeper look into my philosophy, process, and approach, read my manifesto below.
This Is: Contemporary Patternism
Contemporary Patternism - taking a shape and walking with an emotion, an act of transformative healing.
Contemporary Patternism started as an intense bereavement reaction and manifested through heightened sensory perception—specifically to colour and sound—which led to daily walks within pockets of nature in the city alongside energetic tracks and the creation of colourful collages in response.
Handling cumulative grief alongside fresh trauma was a very layered journey and a huge energetic release, involving the metaphorical loosening and untying of knots while piecing back together fragments of self into a new form.
This new form involved new ideas and a holistic approach to caring for myself. One element of this was exercising in a way I'd never approached before. Thankfully, a constant was my passion for nature and walking, which made integration easy—my daily walks gradually increased from 15 minutes to 1.5 hours. Using my surrounding environment as a key influence, as I had once done as a young landscape painter and later as a landscape photographer, I started noticing colours in nature—the complementary tones in flowers, the neon runners against neutral backgrounds—while lively dance tracks rattled away, masquerading as motivation to discipline, until I couldn't unsee them.
I intuitively picked up a kids' colour pack from a Pound store and started creating landscape cut-outs from my favourite photographs as an initial call to joy. Soon, I had a huge bag of colourful offcuts. Taking these out one by one, I began to intuitively form abstract compositions, which oddly reflected the delicate act of piecing together a mind torn by loss. Repeatedly cutting and reforming compositions via intuition became its own therapeutic process, with cutting acting as the act of following the line from invisible to visible forms.
Contemporary Patternism is an asymmetrically layered process that transforms human experience by bringing the invisible into the visible through intuition, intention, and the environment as catalyst.
As time progressed and my holistic health improved, I started using the materials with more intentionality, combining intuition with acts of playful creation. Seeing shapes emerge from purely intuitive compositions reminded me of my unresolved passion for doodling triangles. I resolved to undertake the 100 Day Project on Instagram, creating one image a day, exploring 100 different manifestations of a triangle. This was the start.
As I developed games within my practice, memories of my childhood, the 1980s, colour, and fun surfaced—times and eras I loved and cherished, alongside my discovery of the colour wheel in art school when I bought my first complementary outfits. My work developed intentionality alongside intuition, and I effectively felt my way back into my practice, returning to the 'blind compositions' that had always characterised my earlier work.
Beyond shape, rhythm, colour, form, and harmonised compositions lies the understanding that, at our core, we are perpetually grieving and healing. Contemporary Patternism invites anyone to explore their own invisible rhythms and responses to the world around them through bold, bright, joyful colour and a pair of scissors, leading the way toward a healing resolution—taking a shape and walking with an emotion.