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Yannis Maniatakos (1935–2017) lived and worked on Tinos, one of Greece's Cycladic Islands. Whenever possible, though, he would physically be in the Aegean Sea. Spending any more than a few days out of the water would provoke what his partner called a ‘landlocked’ look in his eyes, an observation made in the 2012 film Underwater Painting, which documents his unique process of making.
The blurred appearance of Maniatakos’ sea or landscapes belies the artist's long and close looking. Over the course of multiple dives, he would study the seabed for several hours at a time, commuting to and from his studio by dinghy. More clues can be found in the work’s perspective, which suspends the viewer in place like his canvases, weighted to stay upright. Likewise, their surfaces are thinly layered with gentle waves of ‘slathery, spatula-laid impasto’, as artist and writer Athanasios Argianas evoked.
Maniatakos referenced classical mythology more directly in his sculptural works, which often explored the oceanic underworld of Hades, the Greek god of the dead. This seeps through many works in Undersea notably Christopher Wood’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1929), a 20th century retelling of the ancient myth, and Paul Delvaux’s A Siren in Full Moonlight (1940), a work of British surrealism on loan from Southampton Art Gallery; others, by Ithell Colquhoun, have travelled to Tates St Ives and Britain this summer. Indeed, Argianias likens Maniatakos’ desire for direct experience to that of a ‘turn-of-the-century plein-air painter’, locating him firmly within his Western/European art historical – and geographical – place and time. More contemporary, and deep, responses can be found in concurrent exhibitions across Europe, notably Siren Songs: Water as told by Artists (2025) at Rome’s Villa Medici, including several artists soon to exhibit in British coastal contexts as Jumana Emil Abboud and Emilija Škarnulytė, along with Maniatakos and Klodin Erb, one of few artist women in Hastings’ exhibition.
It is this same context that Zeljko Kujundzic more explicitly grappled with, in his migrations within and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kujundzic (1920-2003) was a multidisciplinary artist and fifth-generation craftsman, born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) of Turkish descent. He pursued education in Dalmatia (now Croatia), at the Royal College of Art in Budapest, Hungary, and Venice, Italy. After World War II, he lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC). There, he helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, later the Kootenay School of Art, and produced a number of public sculptures in Canada and North America.
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Quest under Sea (c. 1950s), an eight-minute film by Zeljko and his family, shows the artist underwater hunting around the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Blurring the boundaries between experimental cinema, documentary, and holiday footage - as well as concrete poetry, with the artist’s hand-drawn intertitles or interventions - it journeys across land, along beaches, and into the waters of the western coast. Recently salvaged from the family archives, the film reflects his deep relation to water and natural environments, which is crucial to understanding his wider practice. In his autobiography, Torn Canvas (1957), the artist recounts his natural ability for swimming and fishing, his wonder, and affinity for the Dalmatian coast. Archive editions of The Scotsman – the newspaper to which he was a regular contributor - provide further details about Zeljko’s efforts to cultivate seaweed, as part of his wider ecologically and environmentally-engaged practice.
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Paintings from private collections and family homes across the UK, not yet seen in public, layer our understanding of his interest in geology, from the extraction of granite from Tormore and stone quarrying depicted at the film's opening. This, alongside their interest in education, is a crucial point of connection with his contemporary Maniatakos, whose island of Tinos was similarly extracted. The Cyclades were the centre of their eponymous Bronze Age culture, known for making white marble idols. (The exhibition is also the last in curator James Russell’s own ‘cycle’ at Hastings Contemporary.)
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Zeljko’s developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in his migrations and movements across borders and seas. He is well-known, widely exhibited, collected, and remembered in Canada. Yet his foundational role in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and formative early work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull has, thus far, been walked over in more conventional art histories.
These current exhibitions and research are vital opportunities to salvage what risks are being lost at sea.
Undersea is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 14 September 2025.
SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries is on view with Travelling Gallery through Scotland until 14 August 2025. Quest Under Sea (c. 1950s) is screened at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) on 19 June 2025: https://waterasmethod.cargo.site/registration-programme
Yannis Maniatakos (1935–2017) lived and worked on Tinos, one of Greece's Cycladic Islands. Whenever possible, though, he would physically be in the Aegean Sea. Spending any more than a few days out of the water would provoke what his partner called a ‘landlocked’ look in his eyes, an observation made in the 2012 film Underwater Painting, which documents his unique process of making.
The blurred appearance of Maniatakos’ sea or landscapes belies the artist's long and close looking. Over the course of multiple dives, he would study the seabed for several hours at a time, commuting to and from his studio by dinghy. More clues can be found in the work’s perspective, which suspends the viewer in place like his canvases, weighted to stay upright. Likewise, their surfaces are thinly layered with gentle waves of ‘slathery, spatula-laid impasto’, as artist and writer Athanasios Argianas evoked.
Maniatakos referenced classical mythology more directly in his sculptural works, which often explored the oceanic underworld of Hades, the Greek god of the dead. This seeps through many works in Undersea notably Christopher Wood’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1929), a 20th century retelling of the ancient myth, and Paul Delvaux’s A Siren in Full Moonlight (1940), a work of British surrealism on loan from Southampton Art Gallery; others, by Ithell Colquhoun, have travelled to Tates St Ives and Britain this summer. Indeed, Argianias likens Maniatakos’ desire for direct experience to that of a ‘turn-of-the-century plein-air painter’, locating him firmly within his Western/European art historical – and geographical – place and time. More contemporary, and deep, responses can be found in concurrent exhibitions across Europe, notably Siren Songs: Water as told by Artists (2025) at Rome’s Villa Medici, including several artists soon to exhibit in British coastal contexts as Jumana Emil Abboud and Emilija Škarnulytė, along with Maniatakos and Klodin Erb, one of few artist women in Hastings’ exhibition.
It is this same context that Zeljko Kujundzic more explicitly grappled with, in his migrations within and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kujundzic (1920-2003) was a multidisciplinary artist and fifth-generation craftsman, born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) of Turkish descent. He pursued education in Dalmatia (now Croatia), at the Royal College of Art in Budapest, Hungary, and Venice, Italy. After World War II, he lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC). There, he helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, later the Kootenay School of Art, and produced a number of public sculptures in Canada and North America.
Quest under Sea (c. 1950s), an eight-minute film by Zeljko and his family, shows the artist underwater hunting around the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Blurring the boundaries between experimental cinema, documentary, and holiday footage - as well as concrete poetry, with the artist’s hand-drawn intertitles or interventions - it journeys across land, along beaches, and into the waters of the western coast. Recently salvaged from the family archives, the film reflects his deep relation to water and natural environments, which is crucial to understanding his wider practice. In his autobiography, Torn Canvas (1957), the artist recounts his natural ability for swimming and fishing, his wonder, and affinity for the Dalmatian coast. Archive editions of The Scotsman – the newspaper to which he was a regular contributor - provide further details about Zeljko’s efforts to cultivate seaweed, as part of his wider ecologically and environmentally-engaged practice.
Paintings from private collections and family homes across the UK, not yet seen in public, layer our understanding of his interest in geology, from the extraction of granite from Tormore and stone quarrying depicted at the film's opening. This, alongside their interest in education, is a crucial point of connection with his contemporary Maniatakos, whose island of Tinos was similarly extracted. The Cyclades were the centre of their eponymous Bronze Age culture, known for making white marble idols. (The exhibition is also the last in curator James Russell’s own ‘cycle’ at Hastings Contemporary.)
Zeljko’s developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in his migrations and movements across borders and seas. He is well-known, widely exhibited, collected, and remembered in Canada. Yet his foundational role in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and formative early work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull has, thus far, been walked over in more conventional art histories.
These current exhibitions and research are vital opportunities to salvage what risks are being lost at sea.
Undersea is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 14 September 2025.
SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries is on view with Travelling Gallery through Scotland until 14 August 2025. Quest Under Sea (c. 1950s) is screened at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) on 19 June 2025: https://waterasmethod.cargo.site/registration-programme
Yannis Maniatakos (1935–2017) lived and worked on Tinos, one of Greece's Cycladic Islands. Whenever possible, though, he would physically be in the Aegean Sea. Spending any more than a few days out of the water would provoke what his partner called a ‘landlocked’ look in his eyes, an observation made in the 2012 film Underwater Painting, which documents his unique process of making.
The blurred appearance of Maniatakos’ sea or landscapes belies the artist's long and close looking. Over the course of multiple dives, he would study the seabed for several hours at a time, commuting to and from his studio by dinghy. More clues can be found in the work’s perspective, which suspends the viewer in place like his canvases, weighted to stay upright. Likewise, their surfaces are thinly layered with gentle waves of ‘slathery, spatula-laid impasto’, as artist and writer Athanasios Argianas evoked.
Maniatakos referenced classical mythology more directly in his sculptural works, which often explored the oceanic underworld of Hades, the Greek god of the dead. This seeps through many works in Undersea notably Christopher Wood’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1929), a 20th century retelling of the ancient myth, and Paul Delvaux’s A Siren in Full Moonlight (1940), a work of British surrealism on loan from Southampton Art Gallery; others, by Ithell Colquhoun, have travelled to Tates St Ives and Britain this summer. Indeed, Argianias likens Maniatakos’ desire for direct experience to that of a ‘turn-of-the-century plein-air painter’, locating him firmly within his Western/European art historical – and geographical – place and time. More contemporary, and deep, responses can be found in concurrent exhibitions across Europe, notably Siren Songs: Water as told by Artists (2025) at Rome’s Villa Medici, including several artists soon to exhibit in British coastal contexts as Jumana Emil Abboud and Emilija Škarnulytė, along with Maniatakos and Klodin Erb, one of few artist women in Hastings’ exhibition.
It is this same context that Zeljko Kujundzic more explicitly grappled with, in his migrations within and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kujundzic (1920-2003) was a multidisciplinary artist and fifth-generation craftsman, born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) of Turkish descent. He pursued education in Dalmatia (now Croatia), at the Royal College of Art in Budapest, Hungary, and Venice, Italy. After World War II, he lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC). There, he helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, later the Kootenay School of Art, and produced a number of public sculptures in Canada and North America.
Quest under Sea (c. 1950s), an eight-minute film by Zeljko and his family, shows the artist underwater hunting around the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Blurring the boundaries between experimental cinema, documentary, and holiday footage - as well as concrete poetry, with the artist’s hand-drawn intertitles or interventions - it journeys across land, along beaches, and into the waters of the western coast. Recently salvaged from the family archives, the film reflects his deep relation to water and natural environments, which is crucial to understanding his wider practice. In his autobiography, Torn Canvas (1957), the artist recounts his natural ability for swimming and fishing, his wonder, and affinity for the Dalmatian coast. Archive editions of The Scotsman – the newspaper to which he was a regular contributor - provide further details about Zeljko’s efforts to cultivate seaweed, as part of his wider ecologically and environmentally-engaged practice.
Paintings from private collections and family homes across the UK, not yet seen in public, layer our understanding of his interest in geology, from the extraction of granite from Tormore and stone quarrying depicted at the film's opening. This, alongside their interest in education, is a crucial point of connection with his contemporary Maniatakos, whose island of Tinos was similarly extracted. The Cyclades were the centre of their eponymous Bronze Age culture, known for making white marble idols. (The exhibition is also the last in curator James Russell’s own ‘cycle’ at Hastings Contemporary.)
Zeljko’s developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in his migrations and movements across borders and seas. He is well-known, widely exhibited, collected, and remembered in Canada. Yet his foundational role in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and formative early work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull has, thus far, been walked over in more conventional art histories.
These current exhibitions and research are vital opportunities to salvage what risks are being lost at sea.
Undersea is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 14 September 2025.
SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries is on view with Travelling Gallery through Scotland until 14 August 2025. Quest Under Sea (c. 1950s) is screened at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) on 19 June 2025: https://waterasmethod.cargo.site/registration-programme
Yannis Maniatakos (1935–2017) lived and worked on Tinos, one of Greece's Cycladic Islands. Whenever possible, though, he would physically be in the Aegean Sea. Spending any more than a few days out of the water would provoke what his partner called a ‘landlocked’ look in his eyes, an observation made in the 2012 film Underwater Painting, which documents his unique process of making.
The blurred appearance of Maniatakos’ sea or landscapes belies the artist's long and close looking. Over the course of multiple dives, he would study the seabed for several hours at a time, commuting to and from his studio by dinghy. More clues can be found in the work’s perspective, which suspends the viewer in place like his canvases, weighted to stay upright. Likewise, their surfaces are thinly layered with gentle waves of ‘slathery, spatula-laid impasto’, as artist and writer Athanasios Argianas evoked.
Maniatakos referenced classical mythology more directly in his sculptural works, which often explored the oceanic underworld of Hades, the Greek god of the dead. This seeps through many works in Undersea notably Christopher Wood’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1929), a 20th century retelling of the ancient myth, and Paul Delvaux’s A Siren in Full Moonlight (1940), a work of British surrealism on loan from Southampton Art Gallery; others, by Ithell Colquhoun, have travelled to Tates St Ives and Britain this summer. Indeed, Argianias likens Maniatakos’ desire for direct experience to that of a ‘turn-of-the-century plein-air painter’, locating him firmly within his Western/European art historical – and geographical – place and time. More contemporary, and deep, responses can be found in concurrent exhibitions across Europe, notably Siren Songs: Water as told by Artists (2025) at Rome’s Villa Medici, including several artists soon to exhibit in British coastal contexts as Jumana Emil Abboud and Emilija Škarnulytė, along with Maniatakos and Klodin Erb, one of few artist women in Hastings’ exhibition.
It is this same context that Zeljko Kujundzic more explicitly grappled with, in his migrations within and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kujundzic (1920-2003) was a multidisciplinary artist and fifth-generation craftsman, born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) of Turkish descent. He pursued education in Dalmatia (now Croatia), at the Royal College of Art in Budapest, Hungary, and Venice, Italy. After World War II, he lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC). There, he helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, later the Kootenay School of Art, and produced a number of public sculptures in Canada and North America.
Quest under Sea (c. 1950s), an eight-minute film by Zeljko and his family, shows the artist underwater hunting around the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Blurring the boundaries between experimental cinema, documentary, and holiday footage - as well as concrete poetry, with the artist’s hand-drawn intertitles or interventions - it journeys across land, along beaches, and into the waters of the western coast. Recently salvaged from the family archives, the film reflects his deep relation to water and natural environments, which is crucial to understanding his wider practice. In his autobiography, Torn Canvas (1957), the artist recounts his natural ability for swimming and fishing, his wonder, and affinity for the Dalmatian coast. Archive editions of The Scotsman – the newspaper to which he was a regular contributor - provide further details about Zeljko’s efforts to cultivate seaweed, as part of his wider ecologically and environmentally-engaged practice.
Paintings from private collections and family homes across the UK, not yet seen in public, layer our understanding of his interest in geology, from the extraction of granite from Tormore and stone quarrying depicted at the film's opening. This, alongside their interest in education, is a crucial point of connection with his contemporary Maniatakos, whose island of Tinos was similarly extracted. The Cyclades were the centre of their eponymous Bronze Age culture, known for making white marble idols. (The exhibition is also the last in curator James Russell’s own ‘cycle’ at Hastings Contemporary.)
Zeljko’s developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in his migrations and movements across borders and seas. He is well-known, widely exhibited, collected, and remembered in Canada. Yet his foundational role in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and formative early work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull has, thus far, been walked over in more conventional art histories.
These current exhibitions and research are vital opportunities to salvage what risks are being lost at sea.
Undersea is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 14 September 2025.
SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries is on view with Travelling Gallery through Scotland until 14 August 2025. Quest Under Sea (c. 1950s) is screened at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) on 19 June 2025: https://waterasmethod.cargo.site/registration-programme
Yannis Maniatakos (1935–2017) lived and worked on Tinos, one of Greece's Cycladic Islands. Whenever possible, though, he would physically be in the Aegean Sea. Spending any more than a few days out of the water would provoke what his partner called a ‘landlocked’ look in his eyes, an observation made in the 2012 film Underwater Painting, which documents his unique process of making.
The blurred appearance of Maniatakos’ sea or landscapes belies the artist's long and close looking. Over the course of multiple dives, he would study the seabed for several hours at a time, commuting to and from his studio by dinghy. More clues can be found in the work’s perspective, which suspends the viewer in place like his canvases, weighted to stay upright. Likewise, their surfaces are thinly layered with gentle waves of ‘slathery, spatula-laid impasto’, as artist and writer Athanasios Argianas evoked.
Maniatakos referenced classical mythology more directly in his sculptural works, which often explored the oceanic underworld of Hades, the Greek god of the dead. This seeps through many works in Undersea notably Christopher Wood’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1929), a 20th century retelling of the ancient myth, and Paul Delvaux’s A Siren in Full Moonlight (1940), a work of British surrealism on loan from Southampton Art Gallery; others, by Ithell Colquhoun, have travelled to Tates St Ives and Britain this summer. Indeed, Argianias likens Maniatakos’ desire for direct experience to that of a ‘turn-of-the-century plein-air painter’, locating him firmly within his Western/European art historical – and geographical – place and time. More contemporary, and deep, responses can be found in concurrent exhibitions across Europe, notably Siren Songs: Water as told by Artists (2025) at Rome’s Villa Medici, including several artists soon to exhibit in British coastal contexts as Jumana Emil Abboud and Emilija Škarnulytė, along with Maniatakos and Klodin Erb, one of few artist women in Hastings’ exhibition.
It is this same context that Zeljko Kujundzic more explicitly grappled with, in his migrations within and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kujundzic (1920-2003) was a multidisciplinary artist and fifth-generation craftsman, born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) of Turkish descent. He pursued education in Dalmatia (now Croatia), at the Royal College of Art in Budapest, Hungary, and Venice, Italy. After World War II, he lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC). There, he helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, later the Kootenay School of Art, and produced a number of public sculptures in Canada and North America.
Quest under Sea (c. 1950s), an eight-minute film by Zeljko and his family, shows the artist underwater hunting around the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Blurring the boundaries between experimental cinema, documentary, and holiday footage - as well as concrete poetry, with the artist’s hand-drawn intertitles or interventions - it journeys across land, along beaches, and into the waters of the western coast. Recently salvaged from the family archives, the film reflects his deep relation to water and natural environments, which is crucial to understanding his wider practice. In his autobiography, Torn Canvas (1957), the artist recounts his natural ability for swimming and fishing, his wonder, and affinity for the Dalmatian coast. Archive editions of The Scotsman – the newspaper to which he was a regular contributor - provide further details about Zeljko’s efforts to cultivate seaweed, as part of his wider ecologically and environmentally-engaged practice.
Paintings from private collections and family homes across the UK, not yet seen in public, layer our understanding of his interest in geology, from the extraction of granite from Tormore and stone quarrying depicted at the film's opening. This, alongside their interest in education, is a crucial point of connection with his contemporary Maniatakos, whose island of Tinos was similarly extracted. The Cyclades were the centre of their eponymous Bronze Age culture, known for making white marble idols. (The exhibition is also the last in curator James Russell’s own ‘cycle’ at Hastings Contemporary.)
Zeljko’s developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in his migrations and movements across borders and seas. He is well-known, widely exhibited, collected, and remembered in Canada. Yet his foundational role in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and formative early work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull has, thus far, been walked over in more conventional art histories.
These current exhibitions and research are vital opportunities to salvage what risks are being lost at sea.
Undersea is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 14 September 2025.
SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries is on view with Travelling Gallery through Scotland until 14 August 2025. Quest Under Sea (c. 1950s) is screened at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) on 19 June 2025: https://waterasmethod.cargo.site/registration-programme
Yannis Maniatakos (1935–2017) lived and worked on Tinos, one of Greece's Cycladic Islands. Whenever possible, though, he would physically be in the Aegean Sea. Spending any more than a few days out of the water would provoke what his partner called a ‘landlocked’ look in his eyes, an observation made in the 2012 film Underwater Painting, which documents his unique process of making.
The blurred appearance of Maniatakos’ sea or landscapes belies the artist's long and close looking. Over the course of multiple dives, he would study the seabed for several hours at a time, commuting to and from his studio by dinghy. More clues can be found in the work’s perspective, which suspends the viewer in place like his canvases, weighted to stay upright. Likewise, their surfaces are thinly layered with gentle waves of ‘slathery, spatula-laid impasto’, as artist and writer Athanasios Argianas evoked.
Maniatakos referenced classical mythology more directly in his sculptural works, which often explored the oceanic underworld of Hades, the Greek god of the dead. This seeps through many works in Undersea notably Christopher Wood’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1929), a 20th century retelling of the ancient myth, and Paul Delvaux’s A Siren in Full Moonlight (1940), a work of British surrealism on loan from Southampton Art Gallery; others, by Ithell Colquhoun, have travelled to Tates St Ives and Britain this summer. Indeed, Argianias likens Maniatakos’ desire for direct experience to that of a ‘turn-of-the-century plein-air painter’, locating him firmly within his Western/European art historical – and geographical – place and time. More contemporary, and deep, responses can be found in concurrent exhibitions across Europe, notably Siren Songs: Water as told by Artists (2025) at Rome’s Villa Medici, including several artists soon to exhibit in British coastal contexts as Jumana Emil Abboud and Emilija Škarnulytė, along with Maniatakos and Klodin Erb, one of few artist women in Hastings’ exhibition.
It is this same context that Zeljko Kujundzic more explicitly grappled with, in his migrations within and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kujundzic (1920-2003) was a multidisciplinary artist and fifth-generation craftsman, born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) of Turkish descent. He pursued education in Dalmatia (now Croatia), at the Royal College of Art in Budapest, Hungary, and Venice, Italy. After World War II, he lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC). There, he helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, later the Kootenay School of Art, and produced a number of public sculptures in Canada and North America.
Quest under Sea (c. 1950s), an eight-minute film by Zeljko and his family, shows the artist underwater hunting around the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Blurring the boundaries between experimental cinema, documentary, and holiday footage - as well as concrete poetry, with the artist’s hand-drawn intertitles or interventions - it journeys across land, along beaches, and into the waters of the western coast. Recently salvaged from the family archives, the film reflects his deep relation to water and natural environments, which is crucial to understanding his wider practice. In his autobiography, Torn Canvas (1957), the artist recounts his natural ability for swimming and fishing, his wonder, and affinity for the Dalmatian coast. Archive editions of The Scotsman – the newspaper to which he was a regular contributor - provide further details about Zeljko’s efforts to cultivate seaweed, as part of his wider ecologically and environmentally-engaged practice.
Paintings from private collections and family homes across the UK, not yet seen in public, layer our understanding of his interest in geology, from the extraction of granite from Tormore and stone quarrying depicted at the film's opening. This, alongside their interest in education, is a crucial point of connection with his contemporary Maniatakos, whose island of Tinos was similarly extracted. The Cyclades were the centre of their eponymous Bronze Age culture, known for making white marble idols. (The exhibition is also the last in curator James Russell’s own ‘cycle’ at Hastings Contemporary.)
Zeljko’s developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in his migrations and movements across borders and seas. He is well-known, widely exhibited, collected, and remembered in Canada. Yet his foundational role in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and formative early work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull has, thus far, been walked over in more conventional art histories.
These current exhibitions and research are vital opportunities to salvage what risks are being lost at sea.
Undersea is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 14 September 2025.
SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries is on view with Travelling Gallery through Scotland until 14 August 2025. Quest Under Sea (c. 1950s) is screened at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) on 19 June 2025: https://waterasmethod.cargo.site/registration-programme
Yannis Maniatakos (1935–2017) lived and worked on Tinos, one of Greece's Cycladic Islands. Whenever possible, though, he would physically be in the Aegean Sea. Spending any more than a few days out of the water would provoke what his partner called a ‘landlocked’ look in his eyes, an observation made in the 2012 film Underwater Painting, which documents his unique process of making.
The blurred appearance of Maniatakos’ sea or landscapes belies the artist's long and close looking. Over the course of multiple dives, he would study the seabed for several hours at a time, commuting to and from his studio by dinghy. More clues can be found in the work’s perspective, which suspends the viewer in place like his canvases, weighted to stay upright. Likewise, their surfaces are thinly layered with gentle waves of ‘slathery, spatula-laid impasto’, as artist and writer Athanasios Argianas evoked.
Maniatakos referenced classical mythology more directly in his sculptural works, which often explored the oceanic underworld of Hades, the Greek god of the dead. This seeps through many works in Undersea notably Christopher Wood’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1929), a 20th century retelling of the ancient myth, and Paul Delvaux’s A Siren in Full Moonlight (1940), a work of British surrealism on loan from Southampton Art Gallery; others, by Ithell Colquhoun, have travelled to Tates St Ives and Britain this summer. Indeed, Argianias likens Maniatakos’ desire for direct experience to that of a ‘turn-of-the-century plein-air painter’, locating him firmly within his Western/European art historical – and geographical – place and time. More contemporary, and deep, responses can be found in concurrent exhibitions across Europe, notably Siren Songs: Water as told by Artists (2025) at Rome’s Villa Medici, including several artists soon to exhibit in British coastal contexts as Jumana Emil Abboud and Emilija Škarnulytė, along with Maniatakos and Klodin Erb, one of few artist women in Hastings’ exhibition.
It is this same context that Zeljko Kujundzic more explicitly grappled with, in his migrations within and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kujundzic (1920-2003) was a multidisciplinary artist and fifth-generation craftsman, born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) of Turkish descent. He pursued education in Dalmatia (now Croatia), at the Royal College of Art in Budapest, Hungary, and Venice, Italy. After World War II, he lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC). There, he helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, later the Kootenay School of Art, and produced a number of public sculptures in Canada and North America.
Quest under Sea (c. 1950s), an eight-minute film by Zeljko and his family, shows the artist underwater hunting around the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Blurring the boundaries between experimental cinema, documentary, and holiday footage - as well as concrete poetry, with the artist’s hand-drawn intertitles or interventions - it journeys across land, along beaches, and into the waters of the western coast. Recently salvaged from the family archives, the film reflects his deep relation to water and natural environments, which is crucial to understanding his wider practice. In his autobiography, Torn Canvas (1957), the artist recounts his natural ability for swimming and fishing, his wonder, and affinity for the Dalmatian coast. Archive editions of The Scotsman – the newspaper to which he was a regular contributor - provide further details about Zeljko’s efforts to cultivate seaweed, as part of his wider ecologically and environmentally-engaged practice.
Paintings from private collections and family homes across the UK, not yet seen in public, layer our understanding of his interest in geology, from the extraction of granite from Tormore and stone quarrying depicted at the film's opening. This, alongside their interest in education, is a crucial point of connection with his contemporary Maniatakos, whose island of Tinos was similarly extracted. The Cyclades were the centre of their eponymous Bronze Age culture, known for making white marble idols. (The exhibition is also the last in curator James Russell’s own ‘cycle’ at Hastings Contemporary.)
Zeljko’s developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in his migrations and movements across borders and seas. He is well-known, widely exhibited, collected, and remembered in Canada. Yet his foundational role in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and formative early work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull has, thus far, been walked over in more conventional art histories.
These current exhibitions and research are vital opportunities to salvage what risks are being lost at sea.
Undersea is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 14 September 2025.
SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries is on view with Travelling Gallery through Scotland until 14 August 2025. Quest Under Sea (c. 1950s) is screened at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) on 19 June 2025: https://waterasmethod.cargo.site/registration-programme
Yannis Maniatakos (1935–2017) lived and worked on Tinos, one of Greece's Cycladic Islands. Whenever possible, though, he would physically be in the Aegean Sea. Spending any more than a few days out of the water would provoke what his partner called a ‘landlocked’ look in his eyes, an observation made in the 2012 film Underwater Painting, which documents his unique process of making.
The blurred appearance of Maniatakos’ sea or landscapes belies the artist's long and close looking. Over the course of multiple dives, he would study the seabed for several hours at a time, commuting to and from his studio by dinghy. More clues can be found in the work’s perspective, which suspends the viewer in place like his canvases, weighted to stay upright. Likewise, their surfaces are thinly layered with gentle waves of ‘slathery, spatula-laid impasto’, as artist and writer Athanasios Argianas evoked.
Maniatakos referenced classical mythology more directly in his sculptural works, which often explored the oceanic underworld of Hades, the Greek god of the dead. This seeps through many works in Undersea notably Christopher Wood’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1929), a 20th century retelling of the ancient myth, and Paul Delvaux’s A Siren in Full Moonlight (1940), a work of British surrealism on loan from Southampton Art Gallery; others, by Ithell Colquhoun, have travelled to Tates St Ives and Britain this summer. Indeed, Argianias likens Maniatakos’ desire for direct experience to that of a ‘turn-of-the-century plein-air painter’, locating him firmly within his Western/European art historical – and geographical – place and time. More contemporary, and deep, responses can be found in concurrent exhibitions across Europe, notably Siren Songs: Water as told by Artists (2025) at Rome’s Villa Medici, including several artists soon to exhibit in British coastal contexts as Jumana Emil Abboud and Emilija Škarnulytė, along with Maniatakos and Klodin Erb, one of few artist women in Hastings’ exhibition.
It is this same context that Zeljko Kujundzic more explicitly grappled with, in his migrations within and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kujundzic (1920-2003) was a multidisciplinary artist and fifth-generation craftsman, born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) of Turkish descent. He pursued education in Dalmatia (now Croatia), at the Royal College of Art in Budapest, Hungary, and Venice, Italy. After World War II, he lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC). There, he helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, later the Kootenay School of Art, and produced a number of public sculptures in Canada and North America.
Quest under Sea (c. 1950s), an eight-minute film by Zeljko and his family, shows the artist underwater hunting around the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Blurring the boundaries between experimental cinema, documentary, and holiday footage - as well as concrete poetry, with the artist’s hand-drawn intertitles or interventions - it journeys across land, along beaches, and into the waters of the western coast. Recently salvaged from the family archives, the film reflects his deep relation to water and natural environments, which is crucial to understanding his wider practice. In his autobiography, Torn Canvas (1957), the artist recounts his natural ability for swimming and fishing, his wonder, and affinity for the Dalmatian coast. Archive editions of The Scotsman – the newspaper to which he was a regular contributor - provide further details about Zeljko’s efforts to cultivate seaweed, as part of his wider ecologically and environmentally-engaged practice.
Paintings from private collections and family homes across the UK, not yet seen in public, layer our understanding of his interest in geology, from the extraction of granite from Tormore and stone quarrying depicted at the film's opening. This, alongside their interest in education, is a crucial point of connection with his contemporary Maniatakos, whose island of Tinos was similarly extracted. The Cyclades were the centre of their eponymous Bronze Age culture, known for making white marble idols. (The exhibition is also the last in curator James Russell’s own ‘cycle’ at Hastings Contemporary.)
Zeljko’s developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in his migrations and movements across borders and seas. He is well-known, widely exhibited, collected, and remembered in Canada. Yet his foundational role in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and formative early work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull has, thus far, been walked over in more conventional art histories.
These current exhibitions and research are vital opportunities to salvage what risks are being lost at sea.
Undersea is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 14 September 2025.
SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries is on view with Travelling Gallery through Scotland until 14 August 2025. Quest Under Sea (c. 1950s) is screened at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) on 19 June 2025: https://waterasmethod.cargo.site/registration-programme
Yannis Maniatakos (1935–2017) lived and worked on Tinos, one of Greece's Cycladic Islands. Whenever possible, though, he would physically be in the Aegean Sea. Spending any more than a few days out of the water would provoke what his partner called a ‘landlocked’ look in his eyes, an observation made in the 2012 film Underwater Painting, which documents his unique process of making.
The blurred appearance of Maniatakos’ sea or landscapes belies the artist's long and close looking. Over the course of multiple dives, he would study the seabed for several hours at a time, commuting to and from his studio by dinghy. More clues can be found in the work’s perspective, which suspends the viewer in place like his canvases, weighted to stay upright. Likewise, their surfaces are thinly layered with gentle waves of ‘slathery, spatula-laid impasto’, as artist and writer Athanasios Argianas evoked.
Maniatakos referenced classical mythology more directly in his sculptural works, which often explored the oceanic underworld of Hades, the Greek god of the dead. This seeps through many works in Undersea notably Christopher Wood’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1929), a 20th century retelling of the ancient myth, and Paul Delvaux’s A Siren in Full Moonlight (1940), a work of British surrealism on loan from Southampton Art Gallery; others, by Ithell Colquhoun, have travelled to Tates St Ives and Britain this summer. Indeed, Argianias likens Maniatakos’ desire for direct experience to that of a ‘turn-of-the-century plein-air painter’, locating him firmly within his Western/European art historical – and geographical – place and time. More contemporary, and deep, responses can be found in concurrent exhibitions across Europe, notably Siren Songs: Water as told by Artists (2025) at Rome’s Villa Medici, including several artists soon to exhibit in British coastal contexts as Jumana Emil Abboud and Emilija Škarnulytė, along with Maniatakos and Klodin Erb, one of few artist women in Hastings’ exhibition.
It is this same context that Zeljko Kujundzic more explicitly grappled with, in his migrations within and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kujundzic (1920-2003) was a multidisciplinary artist and fifth-generation craftsman, born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) of Turkish descent. He pursued education in Dalmatia (now Croatia), at the Royal College of Art in Budapest, Hungary, and Venice, Italy. After World War II, he lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC). There, he helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, later the Kootenay School of Art, and produced a number of public sculptures in Canada and North America.
Quest under Sea (c. 1950s), an eight-minute film by Zeljko and his family, shows the artist underwater hunting around the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Blurring the boundaries between experimental cinema, documentary, and holiday footage - as well as concrete poetry, with the artist’s hand-drawn intertitles or interventions - it journeys across land, along beaches, and into the waters of the western coast. Recently salvaged from the family archives, the film reflects his deep relation to water and natural environments, which is crucial to understanding his wider practice. In his autobiography, Torn Canvas (1957), the artist recounts his natural ability for swimming and fishing, his wonder, and affinity for the Dalmatian coast. Archive editions of The Scotsman – the newspaper to which he was a regular contributor - provide further details about Zeljko’s efforts to cultivate seaweed, as part of his wider ecologically and environmentally-engaged practice.
Paintings from private collections and family homes across the UK, not yet seen in public, layer our understanding of his interest in geology, from the extraction of granite from Tormore and stone quarrying depicted at the film's opening. This, alongside their interest in education, is a crucial point of connection with his contemporary Maniatakos, whose island of Tinos was similarly extracted. The Cyclades were the centre of their eponymous Bronze Age culture, known for making white marble idols. (The exhibition is also the last in curator James Russell’s own ‘cycle’ at Hastings Contemporary.)
Zeljko’s developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in his migrations and movements across borders and seas. He is well-known, widely exhibited, collected, and remembered in Canada. Yet his foundational role in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and formative early work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull has, thus far, been walked over in more conventional art histories.
These current exhibitions and research are vital opportunities to salvage what risks are being lost at sea.
Undersea is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 14 September 2025.
SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries is on view with Travelling Gallery through Scotland until 14 August 2025. Quest Under Sea (c. 1950s) is screened at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) on 19 June 2025: https://waterasmethod.cargo.site/registration-programme
Yannis Maniatakos (1935–2017) lived and worked on Tinos, one of Greece's Cycladic Islands. Whenever possible, though, he would physically be in the Aegean Sea. Spending any more than a few days out of the water would provoke what his partner called a ‘landlocked’ look in his eyes, an observation made in the 2012 film Underwater Painting, which documents his unique process of making.
The blurred appearance of Maniatakos’ sea or landscapes belies the artist's long and close looking. Over the course of multiple dives, he would study the seabed for several hours at a time, commuting to and from his studio by dinghy. More clues can be found in the work’s perspective, which suspends the viewer in place like his canvases, weighted to stay upright. Likewise, their surfaces are thinly layered with gentle waves of ‘slathery, spatula-laid impasto’, as artist and writer Athanasios Argianas evoked.
Maniatakos referenced classical mythology more directly in his sculptural works, which often explored the oceanic underworld of Hades, the Greek god of the dead. This seeps through many works in Undersea notably Christopher Wood’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1929), a 20th century retelling of the ancient myth, and Paul Delvaux’s A Siren in Full Moonlight (1940), a work of British surrealism on loan from Southampton Art Gallery; others, by Ithell Colquhoun, have travelled to Tates St Ives and Britain this summer. Indeed, Argianias likens Maniatakos’ desire for direct experience to that of a ‘turn-of-the-century plein-air painter’, locating him firmly within his Western/European art historical – and geographical – place and time. More contemporary, and deep, responses can be found in concurrent exhibitions across Europe, notably Siren Songs: Water as told by Artists (2025) at Rome’s Villa Medici, including several artists soon to exhibit in British coastal contexts as Jumana Emil Abboud and Emilija Škarnulytė, along with Maniatakos and Klodin Erb, one of few artist women in Hastings’ exhibition.
It is this same context that Zeljko Kujundzic more explicitly grappled with, in his migrations within and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kujundzic (1920-2003) was a multidisciplinary artist and fifth-generation craftsman, born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) of Turkish descent. He pursued education in Dalmatia (now Croatia), at the Royal College of Art in Budapest, Hungary, and Venice, Italy. After World War II, he lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC). There, he helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, later the Kootenay School of Art, and produced a number of public sculptures in Canada and North America.
Quest under Sea (c. 1950s), an eight-minute film by Zeljko and his family, shows the artist underwater hunting around the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Blurring the boundaries between experimental cinema, documentary, and holiday footage - as well as concrete poetry, with the artist’s hand-drawn intertitles or interventions - it journeys across land, along beaches, and into the waters of the western coast. Recently salvaged from the family archives, the film reflects his deep relation to water and natural environments, which is crucial to understanding his wider practice. In his autobiography, Torn Canvas (1957), the artist recounts his natural ability for swimming and fishing, his wonder, and affinity for the Dalmatian coast. Archive editions of The Scotsman – the newspaper to which he was a regular contributor - provide further details about Zeljko’s efforts to cultivate seaweed, as part of his wider ecologically and environmentally-engaged practice.
Paintings from private collections and family homes across the UK, not yet seen in public, layer our understanding of his interest in geology, from the extraction of granite from Tormore and stone quarrying depicted at the film's opening. This, alongside their interest in education, is a crucial point of connection with his contemporary Maniatakos, whose island of Tinos was similarly extracted. The Cyclades were the centre of their eponymous Bronze Age culture, known for making white marble idols. (The exhibition is also the last in curator James Russell’s own ‘cycle’ at Hastings Contemporary.)
Zeljko’s developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in his migrations and movements across borders and seas. He is well-known, widely exhibited, collected, and remembered in Canada. Yet his foundational role in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and formative early work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull has, thus far, been walked over in more conventional art histories.
These current exhibitions and research are vital opportunities to salvage what risks are being lost at sea.
Undersea is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 14 September 2025.
SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries is on view with Travelling Gallery through Scotland until 14 August 2025. Quest Under Sea (c. 1950s) is screened at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) on 19 June 2025: https://waterasmethod.cargo.site/registration-programme
Yannis Maniatakos (1935–2017) lived and worked on Tinos, one of Greece's Cycladic Islands. Whenever possible, though, he would physically be in the Aegean Sea. Spending any more than a few days out of the water would provoke what his partner called a ‘landlocked’ look in his eyes, an observation made in the 2012 film Underwater Painting, which documents his unique process of making.
The blurred appearance of Maniatakos’ sea or landscapes belies the artist's long and close looking. Over the course of multiple dives, he would study the seabed for several hours at a time, commuting to and from his studio by dinghy. More clues can be found in the work’s perspective, which suspends the viewer in place like his canvases, weighted to stay upright. Likewise, their surfaces are thinly layered with gentle waves of ‘slathery, spatula-laid impasto’, as artist and writer Athanasios Argianas evoked.
Maniatakos referenced classical mythology more directly in his sculptural works, which often explored the oceanic underworld of Hades, the Greek god of the dead. This seeps through many works in Undersea notably Christopher Wood’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1929), a 20th century retelling of the ancient myth, and Paul Delvaux’s A Siren in Full Moonlight (1940), a work of British surrealism on loan from Southampton Art Gallery; others, by Ithell Colquhoun, have travelled to Tates St Ives and Britain this summer. Indeed, Argianias likens Maniatakos’ desire for direct experience to that of a ‘turn-of-the-century plein-air painter’, locating him firmly within his Western/European art historical – and geographical – place and time. More contemporary, and deep, responses can be found in concurrent exhibitions across Europe, notably Siren Songs: Water as told by Artists (2025) at Rome’s Villa Medici, including several artists soon to exhibit in British coastal contexts as Jumana Emil Abboud and Emilija Škarnulytė, along with Maniatakos and Klodin Erb, one of few artist women in Hastings’ exhibition.
It is this same context that Zeljko Kujundzic more explicitly grappled with, in his migrations within and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kujundzic (1920-2003) was a multidisciplinary artist and fifth-generation craftsman, born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) of Turkish descent. He pursued education in Dalmatia (now Croatia), at the Royal College of Art in Budapest, Hungary, and Venice, Italy. After World War II, he lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC). There, he helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, later the Kootenay School of Art, and produced a number of public sculptures in Canada and North America.
Quest under Sea (c. 1950s), an eight-minute film by Zeljko and his family, shows the artist underwater hunting around the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Blurring the boundaries between experimental cinema, documentary, and holiday footage - as well as concrete poetry, with the artist’s hand-drawn intertitles or interventions - it journeys across land, along beaches, and into the waters of the western coast. Recently salvaged from the family archives, the film reflects his deep relation to water and natural environments, which is crucial to understanding his wider practice. In his autobiography, Torn Canvas (1957), the artist recounts his natural ability for swimming and fishing, his wonder, and affinity for the Dalmatian coast. Archive editions of The Scotsman – the newspaper to which he was a regular contributor - provide further details about Zeljko’s efforts to cultivate seaweed, as part of his wider ecologically and environmentally-engaged practice.
Paintings from private collections and family homes across the UK, not yet seen in public, layer our understanding of his interest in geology, from the extraction of granite from Tormore and stone quarrying depicted at the film's opening. This, alongside their interest in education, is a crucial point of connection with his contemporary Maniatakos, whose island of Tinos was similarly extracted. The Cyclades were the centre of their eponymous Bronze Age culture, known for making white marble idols. (The exhibition is also the last in curator James Russell’s own ‘cycle’ at Hastings Contemporary.)
Zeljko’s developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in his migrations and movements across borders and seas. He is well-known, widely exhibited, collected, and remembered in Canada. Yet his foundational role in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and formative early work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull has, thus far, been walked over in more conventional art histories.
These current exhibitions and research are vital opportunities to salvage what risks are being lost at sea.
Undersea is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 14 September 2025.
SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries is on view with Travelling Gallery through Scotland until 14 August 2025. Quest Under Sea (c. 1950s) is screened at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) on 19 June 2025: https://waterasmethod.cargo.site/registration-programme
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