Katherine Demetriou Sidelsky
Hand-bent steel, metal wax
72 x 22 x 12”
MW : How did your interest in art begin?
KSD : It began at home. My adoptive parents were creative in different ways, and our home was filled with their interests—drawings and paintings hung on every wall, with curious objects throughout. My mother was an artist, and drawing was part of her vocabulary as she often sketched to highlight her points while she spoke. My father, a geological engineer, preferred music to conversation and drew more precisely, using mechanical pencils and scales on graph paper. He enjoyed working in the garden and observing how all things worked together in nature. That environment fueled my early interest in both art and science and later led me to architecture and my own minimal mode of expression. I love an unadorned wall.
Archival pigment print on cotton rag
MW : How do photography, sculpture, and installation allow you to address topics of boundaries differently?
Do they overlap, and if so how?
KDS : The boundaries between photography, sculpture, and installation are less important than the questions that move across them. Within that, I’m interested in extending what a boundary can be conceptually, and how it can function as a place of exchange across physical and social barriers. I find that boundaries shift between permeability and containment in all three.
For example, the crossing of a boundary occurs when one looks through the viewfinder of a camera. Yet, its placement and outline determine what’s bound to this exchange, and what’s excluded.
In sculpture, boundaries are material and perceptual. I’m curious how shadows and reflections act as echoes, extending the work beyond itself. Reflective surfaces and bifacial ( two-sided ) forms create doubling between object and image, front and back.
Installation extends boundaries to place and time as the work adapts to new environments, and is activated through the viewer’s movement and gaze - to avert, cut across, and weave between components. I think this relationship between the body, movement, and the environment can offer ways to both acknowledge and dissolve boundaries.
Archival pigment prints, steel, concrete, metal wax, wire, cardboard from transport box
Archival pigment print, glass, steel, and metal wax
Archival pigment print ( of artist’s father conducting a geological survey in Canada after immigrating from Greece ) glass, steel, and metal wax
MW : In what ways has your architectural training shaped your sense of space, and how are you actively changing parts of this framework?
KDS :
It shaped my understanding of space as one organized through layered frameworks of control. I still think of architecture as a system of persuasive boundaries. I explored this early on through varying degrees of transparency, and later at a much smaller scale with tulle, which allowed boundaries to become soft and contingent. It shifted my focus from walls to thresholds that breathe and transform.
In my current practice, I extend this shift through handmade papers composed of plant fibers, forming porous, impermanent membranes where surface and structure are intertwined and light is filtered. This interrelationship between surface, structure, and openings continues to inform my sense of space.
Surveillance mirrors, steel support, paint, graphite, metal wax
MW : How do you think environments shape our senses of perception and identity?
KDS :
I think perception and identity are shaped through wayfinding, as we navigate access and moments of connection.Spatial, cultural, and gendered structures of control inform those environments, influencing not only how we move through and perceive space, but also how we are perceived and positioned within it.
These systems produce conditions of belonging or exclusion, shaping identity in relation to others. The forces that classify or frame reveal that the ways we see, and the frameworks through which we are seen, are never neutral - they actively shape how we understand ourselves and our place in the world.
Surveillance mirror, steel support, paint, graphite, metal wax
2022. 17 x 22”
Archival pigment print on cotton rag
2022. 17 x 22”
Archival pigment print on cotton rag
MW : How do you select the materials you work with, and how do their qualities influence the final piece?
KDS : Material selection emerges over time, as my way-of-seeing shifts and the environment enters the work. What started as a meditation on walls in architecture led to my desire for materials that are less fixed and more transformative. I became interested in the behavior of tulle - how it operates in space as a topographic membrane and the histories it carries.
I began to notice similar qualities in my landscape, particularly in a sheath of thriving vines. They negotiate constraints and appear limitless, filtering light through their interconnected structure, much like the gridded cells of the tulle. I then began working with thin metal rods as a linear counterpoint to the membranes of tulle and plant matter. Each registers tension and holds memory, absorbing, straining, and adapting to forces. I’m now exploring them together as forms that hold tension between containment and permeability.
Meaning also guides material selection, beyond these formal tensions. When I started with tulle, I wanted to free it from any association with the veil, but over time I became intrigued with it as a feminist critique. Similarly, I was initially drawn to the vines visually as a form of vastness. Over time I grew curious about their history, which led me to Critical Plant Studies and, in turn, to a broader recognition of the agency of plants, and of materials in general.
Porcelain berry, mile-a-minute, abaca, tulle, wood, paint
MW : How can non-extractive approaches to display look like in physical, spatial terms?
KDS :
I don’t think permeability or openness is inherently non-extractive, but can create the conditions for those approaches - especially when they resist total visibility, loosen control, and stay responsive to relation rather than resolving it.
That’s been important for me coming out of architecture, where space is often fully resolved and precisely controlled. In physical terms, that might look like a display that is freestanding but not fixed, or that leans against the wall rather than being attached, or uses reflection to mediate and destabilize what is seen.
Some of my works hold without fully enclosing, or are bifacial, so they can’t be fully apprehended from a single position.
Archival pigment print on cotton rag
MW : How do ideas of migration and home shape the logistics of how your work is built, transported, and reconfigured?
KDS : I’ve moved many times, packing my belongings into boxes to preserve them through transition. But nothing remains unchanged, and this has shaped my approach through practical decisions that allow the work to shift and adapt over time.
My materials are lightweight, and I build to a scale that fits through a 36-inch doorway and within standard shipping limits. Metal frames can be easily assembled into temporary installations, and cardboard boxes serve as storage, shipping containers, and sometimes display structures. These choices come from my experience of home as something adaptive to change, supporting movement, interdependence, and care.
Cardboard, two Botanic Membranes (porcelain berry, mile-a-minute, abaca, tulle), wire
MW : How do you decide when a structure should contain versus remain permeable or open?
KDS :
It usually emerges through the material and the context. I’m interested in holding tension between those states rather than resolving them. Sometimes a structure needs to contain, to establish a threshold. But even then, I introduce points of permeability through light, material openness, or viewer movement, so it doesn’t fully close. I think of it less as a binary decision, and more as calibrating degrees of openness.
MW :
If belonging is something to be reconfigured rather than fixed, what do you hope your work offers as a model, or a question for that rethinking?
KDS :
I hope the connective structures of the tulle and the intertwined plant fibers in the membranes suggest a model of belonging that’s contingent and relational, allowing for both adaptation and resistance without requiring erasure or loss.
It asks what it means to be in - or out of - place.
Porcelain berry, mile-a-minute, abaca, tulle, hand-bent steel, wire, beeswax, graphite, metal wax