Maria Arvaniti is a Greek artist from Thessaloniki and currently lives and works in London. She has early lived memories of the creation of hand-woven and knitted textiles that traditionally and currently form part of dowries in remote village areas in Greece.

Usually created on a loom by young girls aspiring to get married and their close female relatives, these textiles signify social status, family wealth, and a woman’s ability to maintain a tidy and beautiful household.

Inspired by similarities between her own experiences, and visual memories of the dowry, Arvaniti works with woven artworks, duplicating found tight patterns and bringing her previous painting into the 3D.

By lifting the work away from the loom, she has astutely indicated the intrusive and binding nature of the social practices by using pieces of folded paper that nest one into the other to form a whole.

In this recent work, Arvaniti has set out to examine a range of thoughts and feeling that principally women or any individual may be experiencing through other similar social phenomena in the face of uncritically societal norms.

The dowry escapes here its narrow meaning and is applied to different instances of societal pressure on the individual existence/identity within the predefined and long-established norms.