After a week of touring museums and historic sites in Athens and the Greek mainland, we took the ferry to Crete, home to the ancient Minoan Civilization, which flourished on the island thousands of years ago. We were given a private tour of the fantastic Minoan Museum in the city of Heraklion and went to Knossos to wander through the labyrinthine ruins of the palace of Minos, mythical king of the Minoans.
Then we were bussed to the small village of Margaritas, whose main economy is ceramics. We were set up in makeshift studios in the Cultural Centre and asked to produce pieces that related to the Minoan Civilization.
As were most of the Minoan artifacts we saw, our work was to be unglazed and limited to three colours of slip: red, white and black, over the tan coloured clay. We were also asked to make four 12 inch square tiles along with other sculptural work.
I chose two themes: the octopus – a labyrinth in itself with its eight legs (and delicious fresh off the grill!). It decorated many Minoan pots. I put octopi on my tiles and also some pots and plates that I threw on the wheel.
My main sculpture was a Minotaur, the mythical bull-headed man trapped in The Labyrinth at Knossos. One of my Greek colleagues suggested that the Minotaur wished to die to escape his imprisonment, so I made him offering his throat to be slit.
I also made a small model of the ‘bull leapers’, a fresco we’d seen at Knossos. Instead of a European Bovine, my bull was a stylized American Plains Bison, which once roamed in the millions on the prairies where we lived at the time in High River, Alberta.
Of my work, the minotaur, the bull leapers and the tiles were shown in the exhibitions held in Rethimnon, Crete, and The Vorres Museum of Contemporary Greek Art, Athens.
