Vally Nomidou’s series of life-size sculptures are all made of paper and depict young women and young girls. The female figures impress with the naturalness of their features and poses, the perfection of modelling and the beauty of volume.
Paper, Nomidou’s dominant material, now becomes a key component in her creative process, inextricably linked to painful and systematic research on the technical level, as well as on that of aesthetic integration. The artist respects her material and, although it is cheap and vulnerable, she does not “adulterate” it by using other materials. Moreover, she does not use it as a shell, an encasing to cover a necessary inner structure by providing a fake, idealised skin. Nomidou builds and shapes her works from the inside out solely using paper and paperboard. The internal cardboard frame is built with a vertical and horizontal grid in order to be able to support and render stillness in her sculptures, while also ensuring balance in contraction and expansion. The homogeneity of her material allows the equilibrium in the behaviour of the interior and the exterior, and thus ensures its duration.
Regarding her technique, the perfect rendition of facial features, of expression, of the naturalness of pose, of body proportions, is based on a process of combining partial plaster casts, the meticulous observation of an exhaustive photographic documentation of her sitters and a painful processing of the outer skin. The perfect prints are synthesised, cut, sewn, glued, rubbed, and through the mastery of her touch achieve the fully realistic rendering of her sitters. (by Amir)