Featured image: Alter Ego Savage Boss, Trish Gianakis, 2023, mixed media, 10 x 8 in. / 25.4 x 20.32 cm.
Trish Gianakis’s mixed-media works Oral Fixation (2022), Weight of Knowing (2025), and Caged (2020) confront the body as a site of desire, control, and psychological pressure.
Trish Gianakis is a mixed-media artist whose work explores embodiment, desire, silence, and awareness through ceramic, painting, and immersive, technology-inflected forms.
Moving fluidly between sculpture, painting, and augmented reality, Gianakis integrates ceramic, fiber optics, gold leaf, and organic materials to explore how internal states manifest physically. These works do not illustrate narratives so much as externalize conditions, craving, silence, isolation, through materially charged forms.
Oral Fixation, Trish Gianakis, 2022, mixed media, 56 x 18 in. / 142.24 x 45.72 cm.
Oral Fixation presents a ceramic raku face with its mouth forced open, pierced by glowing fiber optic wires that spill outward. The mouth becomes both entry point and exit, symbolizing compulsive craving and the futility of satisfaction. The illuminated strands introduce a seductive, almost technological allure that contrasts with the rawness of the ceramic surface. This tension reinforces the idea of desire as self-perpetuating, stimulated but never resolved. The vertical format elongates the figure, emphasizing the dominance of the mouth as a locus of need and fixation.
Weight of Knowing, Trish Gianakis, 2025, mixed media, 22 x 22 in. / 55.88 x 55.88 cm.
In Weight of Knowing, Gianakis depicts a woman whose expression is heavy with inward focus, her lower lip pierced by three gold loops. The gold leaf accents operate symbolically, referencing both value and burden, while the piercings suggest enforced silence or the cost of awareness. The painted surface is rich and tactile, grounding the figure in flesh and emotion, while the augmented reality component extends the work beyond the static image. This layered approach mirrors the theme itself: knowledge accumulates, multiplies, and reshapes perception rather than offering release.
Caged, Trish Gianakis, 2020, mixed media, 12 x 12 x 12 in. / 30.48 x 30.48 x 30.48 cm.
Caged consists of three spherical vine structures, each encasing a ceramic face. Created in response to COVID-era isolation and enforced distance, the work literalizes separation and containment. The organic vines form irregular cages, protective yet restrictive, around expressions that appear suspended in time. The repetition of the sphere suggests shared experience, while the physical spacing between forms reinforces emotional and social distance. Unlike rigid enclosures, the natural materials imply fragility and impermanence, underscoring the psychological toll of isolation rather than its necessity.
Across these works, Gianakis consistently examines how external forces, social systems, knowledge, desire, and crisis, press upon the body and shape identity. Mouths are obstructed, faces are enclosed, voices are weighted down. The unifying theme is embodied tension: awareness, craving, and isolation are not abstract ideas but lived conditions etched into form and material. Through hybrid media and symbolic construction, Gianakis renders internal struggle visible, physical, and inescapably human.
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Veil of Opulence, Trish Gianakis, 2025, mixed media, 14 x 22 in. / 35.56 x 55.88 cm.
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