The Paddocks Gallery is pleased to present How to Drive, a solo exhibition by Katerina Moschou. Originating in 2022, How to Drive has evolved from an intimate photographic project into an award-winning photobook and a solo exhibition in Wrocław, Poland. Now, for its first presentation in Greece, Moschou expands the series with new photographs and sculptures that trace the relationship between body and the car.
Rooted in the simplicity of everyday moments, How to Drive reflects on a place historically distant to women yet deeply familiar to the artist: a car repair workshop. Her father, a mechanic with a passion for classic Italian cars, provides both the setting and the starting point for this study.
Spending hours in his workshop in the centre of Athens, Moschou observes gestures of care: the lifting of a hood, the touch of fabric, the unveiling of form. Turning the gaze inward, she captures the mechanical parts and materials–soft and raw–their juxtaposition and continuities. Then, behind the wheel herself, the car becomes both stage and vessel; a bounded space where the body performs small, repetitive movements, almost unconsciously. The body becomes an extension of the interior space, its fragments of posture and rhythm composing silent rituals that navigate an act as automated, and seemingly mundane, as driving.
Many aspects of our daily lives remain unnoticed and unrecorded—driving among them. “Once learned, there is no need for heroic gestures. Instead, one must simply succumb to repetition.” the artist notes. Once learned, these motions no longer require thought; they simply happen, quietly shaping our sense of place and time.
There are moments—paused at a red light, hands resting on the steering wheel—when time seems to suspend. We become both observer and observed, enclosed in a small metallic chamber, moving and waiting. While driving, we develop a tactile relationship with the surrounding materials, feeling the car as a membrane between outside and inside, between motion and presence. This dialogue extends into the sculptural works, where the car’s exterior and interior materials are reimagined: metal suggesting safety and dynamism, fabric evoking comfort and bodily protection. Using parts sourced from her father’s workshop—windshields, seat belts, felt covers—the artist carves, pierces, and weaves them, transforming functional components into poetic forms.
The exhibition examines driving as a practice of memory and movement, and the car as a vessel where motion becomes ritual. Within a space traditionally coded as masculine, Moschou reclaims and transforms it into a field of observation. Echoing Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the work reorients attention toward unheroic narratives—often connected to women’s experiences. Through her photographs and sculptures, Moschou translates the act and environment of driving into form and material. In How to Drive, the car is no longer about grand destinations or speed, but becomes a space to embrace what is most often overlooked.
