The Paddocks Gallery is proud to present Room in The Bag of Stars, Kleopatra Tsali’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition features a new series of sculptural installations and mixed-media works on paper, creating a visual world where matter, memory and collectivity intertwine.
“Before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home,” writes American author Ursula K. Le Guin, referencing anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s theory. Before the spear, the sword, the weapon—before the sharp and outward-facing tool—there was the container: a carrier bag for gathering and storing food. According to Fisher (1975), this was humanity’s first cultural invention.
Applying this idea to storytelling in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), Le Guin rejects the conventional, linear progression centred on the Hero’s conquests. Instead, she proposes an alternative narrative structure: the story as a “container,” a cultural carrier bag of many stories. By moving away from the Hero-driven plot, a narrative field emerges where realities intertwine, coexist, and evolve without hierarchies. This “endless story”, as Le Guin describes it, never concludes but continues to unfold, encouraging new meanings and interpretations. In such a story, there is space for multiple stories; there is “room in the bag of stars.”
This concluding phrase from Le Guin’s essay inspires the exhibition’s title, Room in The Bag of Stars, allowing us to imagine what else might be inside this “bag of stars”, the countless possibilities and extensions of a narrative. How many stories can one story hold? How many histories can a single object or material contain? The exhibition reflects Kleopatra Tsali’s ongoing research practice, mapping the various types of clay and rocks in the northwest of Naxos, an island with which she has had strong ties since childhood. Clay, a primal and timeless material, has been used since antiquity for storage and shelter. It carries traces of the past while holding potential for transformation in the present. With the concept of the “container” as both a physical and conceptual tool central to her practice, Tsali’s works and their materials enclose fragments of memory and stories, functioning as “carrier bags” that hold intangible heritages and lived experiences.
On the island of Naxos, clay appears both in its malleable form and as ceramic fragments scattered across the landscape, dating from antiquity to the present. “In those areas,” the artist notes, “Zoe grazes her animals atop the ceramic shards, which she collects purely for the joy of collecting. She invents stories, reassembles the pieces, and creates compositions.” The artist also observes that in Naxos beekeepers, such as Nikos, use ceramic makeshift beehives crafted from materials found in their environment. These beehives, fragile by nature, survive abandoned in various parts of the island. Kleopatra Tsali’s sculptural compositions—made from clay, natural materials, plants, and flowers—reflect both the cyclical time inherent in the material of the scattered fragments and the fragility of the ceramic hives. While appearing as unified, stable constructions, they remain sensitive and portable, resembling ephemeral structures.
The clay of Naxos is also incorporated as a key element in the mixed-media works on paper, appearing in free drawings reminiscent of beehive forms juxtaposed with photographs of stellar particles. Among them is Arrokoth—the most distant space object ever closely observed by NASA, named after the indigenous Powhatan word for “sky.” With its characteristic red, double-lobed form, Arrokoth comprises two bodies that have gently fused over thousands of years. In the exhibition, it serves as a symbolic reference to the connection between clay, the human body and the universe. “We are made of the materials of the stars,” writes the artist. “The redness of clay is linked to the iron of Earth, which is also the iron in our blood, connecting our bodies to the planet in a way”.
Beyond Kleopatra Tsali’s artistic practice and her profound connection to clay, Room in The Bag of Stars holds space for another story that bridges two places: Naxos and Volos. Families of ceramists and potters from Naxos who migrated to Volos in the 19th century carried the knowledge and techniques of clay. One such family is that of Vaggelis Anetopoulos, now 98 years old, who continues his family’s 200-year-old tradition in Lechonia, Pelion. By shedding light on this overlooked chapter in the history of the ceramic and pottery tradition of Naxos and Volos, the exhibition fosters a dialogue between place, matter, and time.
In the exhibition Room in The Bag of Stars, the circularity that defines both the ceramic-making process and the material itself, as well as Kleopatra Tsali’s artistic practice and approach, generously offers a sense of continuous discovery and feeling of security; as if you are wandering among the stars and returning bringing the “energy home”.
