And Here I Bloom, For a Short Hour Unseen

Chryssa Kotoula & Katerina Moschou

 22 May – 4 July 2026


“I have a dream sometimes, not often. I dream that I am in a house, and discover a door I didn’t know
was there. It opens into an unexpected garden, and for a weightless moment I find myself inhabiting new
territory, flush with potential.”

– Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time, 2024

In nature, when two trees come close to one another, they can bind their roots and organically merge. From
the ancient orchards of Asia to contemporary gardens, through human intervention and skilled care, grafting has
evolved into a widespread gardening and agricultural practice–one plant is joined to another allowing them to heal and
grow as one. One part offers the trunk and roots, the other brings the capacity to transform. Bound together in close
contact, they co-create a common entity capable of producing stems, flowers, and fruit. The exhibition And Here I
Bloom, For a Short Hour explores grafting as a form of union through which new identities emerge. Used
metaphorically, it serves as a point of departure for a creative dialogue between Kotoula and Moschou.
By merging their individual artistic practices—ceramics, engraving, drawing, photography, and sculpture—
the artists employ the stages of grafting as a methodology: the preparation of the parts, the binding, the healing, the
union. Initially, plants get “wounded” at specific points or stripped of their surface, undergoing an intense biological
stress that activates complex survival mechanisms. By binding the two parts tightly together, usually with a special
grafting tape, they are held together in place until they heal. A pause; a state of“numbness” where cells of the different
plants gradually intertwine until they entirely fill the gap between them.

Observing nature, time seems to expand. For grafting to succeed, time is required, an almost invisible time
within which the union is gradually formed. In a similar manner, both in ceramics and engraving, pauses are essential for
the processes of materials and surfaces to realise. This “in-between” condition, the point in time at which something is
in the process of being formed, runs throughout the exhibition.

The unseen life of plants–the continuous processes that secretly take place while remaining fully exposed to
their environment–offers the title to the exhibition. And Here I Bloom, For a Short Hour Unseen, an excerpt from a
poem by the American naturalist writer, Henry David Thoreau, in which he reflects on the complexity and vulnerability
of human existence. The verse speaks to decay as an inevitable condition, but also to the enduring search for meaning
and the ability to transform. As in grafting, even after a part of a plant has been separated from its roots, so in the
human condition, the possibility of flowering in new conditions remains.

The life cycle of plants, as well as grafting, could not occur without one essential element: sunlight. Wall-
mounted sconces made of clay and copper, porcelain and metal, evoke light as the force that activates plants and

makes all their functions possible. Similarly, in the exhibition they operate as carriers of vitality, transforming the space
throughout the different hours of the day.

Grafting appears not only as a process, but also as a source of inspiration for the forms and materials of the
works, where Kotoula’s ceramics connect with Moschou’s engraving, sculpture, and drawings. Just as a plant undergoes
“stress” during its preparation for grafting, clay similarly loses moisture, contracts, expands until it stabilises as a
ceramic object. While plants heal, an amorphous tissue is shaped, namely the callus, which never becomes entirely
identical to a natural trunk but remains as a trace of transition. It is within this condition of connection and
disconnection that the artists focus, approaching this transitional form in a schematic way.
Copper, limestone, and ash are materials used for protection and reinforcement in plants, trees, and soil. In
the exhibition, copper appears either as a key component of ceramic glazes, often creating green hues, or as wire
repeatedly wrapped around the works, recalling grafting tape that binds parts together. Handcrafted limestone and ash
from various trees and plants also appear in the works in the form of glazes, shaping surfaces that evoke both the colour
spectrum of grafting stages–from deep greens to browns–and the textures of trunks, branches, and foliage. The same
materials thus migrate from soil and plants into the works of the exhibition, alluding to processes of protection and
regeneration.

The exhibition And Here I Bloom, For a Short Hour Unseen unfolds as a poetic gesture of union, in which artistic
practices and materials do not merely coexist but are bound together, healed, and transformed into a new condition.
By metaphorically approaching grafting as a union, Kotoula and Moschou underline these in-between moments, in
which it is neither fully separated nor fully joined. In doing so, an unstable field between connection and disconnection
emerges, where union is not yet a completed outcome, but an evolving state on the verge of flowering; “a weightless
moment”.

Text & Curation by Lida Koutromanou



I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied

by Henry David Thoreau


I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I'm fixed.
A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.
And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.
Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they're rife.
But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life's vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.
That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.


Copyright Credit: Henry David Thoreau, "I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied" from Collected Poems of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1964): Public domain.
Source: Collected Poems of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (The Johns Hopkins Press, 1964). Poetry Foundation.



Photographs : Andrew Annetopoulos