Spiros Panigirakis is interested in the way in which presentational devices, furniture and organisational frameworks influence the construction of meaning, form and sociability. He has long engaged the role of the studio as a space of production in which results of artistic ‘fieldwork’ are synthesised and transformed. This research-led practice re-envisages situations of cultural and personal significance in the form of diagrams, mappings, manuals, texts and patterns as well as sculptural referents.
Panigirakis often works with groups in both a curatorial and collaborative capacity to address the sited conditions of art and, when working on an individual basis, he alludes to these issues within the content of the work. ‘Garden states’ for example reflected on the relationships and rituals developed within the suburban gardens inhabited by Panigirakis’s parents and their peers. A functional sculpture, it contained diagrammatic drawings depicting networks of people and social systems, reflecting Panigirakis’s interest in the underlying structures of places and groups.
While a great deal of contemporary art is marked by its engagement and response to the environment in which it's installed, Spiros Panigirakis' practice takes this notion a step further. Not only does he actively consider the spaces in which he works, but his works — operating somewhere between sculpture and architecture — literally remodel, re-create, mirror and echo their surrounds.
Dan Rule The Age, September, 2013