[...] Margellos gives months to each of her embroideries, depicting scenes and abstract swatches of color. Like traditional samplers gone wild, they break the grid to tell stories that are individual and emotional, arising from a place of
introspection and unbounded time. She appropriates a traditional craft, the mainstay of domestic culture of her country of residence, Greece. For centuries in the Balkan peninsula embroideries have been part of a woman’s daily
life. Today, they are a favored craft in refugee camps: easy to transport, low cost of production. They are also a favored art form by Palestinian prisoners, both male and female, and they are vehicles and testimonials of solidarity, resistance
and revolt. Margellos’s work also hosts amazing textures.

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[...]

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Their work relies on the transcendent capacity of minutiae to give a form to the overall appearance of a piece. Each work may be fully but differently experienced from afar and in close proximity. There is an invitation to zero-in on these surfaces, to grasp all of the possibilities of each work. Every stitch and leaf counts, as if in witness to the awe the artists feel for “every living thing”. Both Gabbiani and Margellos celebrate organic forms as one finds them in nature, wild growths and fine flowers. [...]

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By Paolo Colombo | Athens, 2018