By Aspa Gika
The Importance of Arts, Culture, The Creative Process, and how this project resonates with you:
Art is how I navigate the in-between spaces—between worlds, identities, and environments. My paintings are rooted in nature, marked by winged creatures that move through utopian landscapes. These wings represent resilience and adaptation: the ability to thrive in air, land, or water. They speak to anyone who has called different places home.
Culture offers the context, the shared memory that shapes how we move and evolve. The creative process is where I listen—where instinct and emotion meet image and form. It’s how I make sense of the quiet truths that can’t be spoken.
Through art, I explore what it means to live between worlds, to change, to belong, and to carry pieces of each place with us. Art doesn’t just reflect life—it lifts it. It gives us wings.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
Much of my inspiration comes from the natural world—the symmetry of insects, the birds in flight, the vast, breathing pulse of the ocean. These elements are more than subjects in my work; they are part of what I deeply love and don’t wish to lose.
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
I think about the next generation often—what kind of world they’ll inherit, what beauty will remain, and what might be lost. It’s hard not to feel the weight of that, especially as the climate changes around us. The natural world I love—birds, insects, the ocean—feels both achingly alive and increasingly fragile. In my paintings, the winged creatures carry not just hope, but a kind of vulnerability too. They remind me how much we still have to protect—and how urgent that protection has become.
