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-ALGIAS AND PHANTASMS    2025
Artemisia Gallery


Of the 100+ uses of the the suffix ‘-algia’, most are medical, denoting pain in a specified region of the body– myalgia for muscle pain, dentalgia for tooth pain, neuralgia for nerve pain. Nestled amongst these are nostalgia, a longing for the past or a homesickness for a life that once was, and solastalgia, a homesickness for the home you still inhabit– pains of the mind and the soul.

In ‘-Algias and Phantasms’ the two pains, physical and emotional, intertwine and communicate, layering former joys with present sufferings and the struggles of the past with dreamscapes of the future. The collages assemble the artist’s drawings, photography and prints from over the years alongside images from childhood, items from their home and mementos collected throughout their life. Eugenie’s work mirrors the convergence of pains of the mind and body, and the way reality is overshadowed by ghosts of past ways of being and apparitions of the imagined future, and the constant presence of real and mythical histories.





      “In ‘Algias and Phantasms’ at Artemisia Gallery, Eugenie Gullifer-Laurie stitches together the remnants of a life lived, felt, and remembered—collaging personal history with mythology, the body with the mind, the past with futuresthat have not yet come to pass 🌼

The works are intimate, almost like opening a long-forgotten drawer of keepsakes—old photographs, pressed flowers that once held scent, paper, string—each material holds memory in its own way, bearing traces of touch, of presence, of something once alive. It’s a delicate archaeology of selfhood, where both literal and emotional sustenance emerge through the compositions—lentils laid in quiet ritualistic rows, offerings of nourishment and care.

Each work, framed in black, holds fragments in flux—faces vanish, figures dissolve, objects waver between presence and absence. Classical statues linger like echoes, while recurring hands reach, grasp, or surrender to time.‘Future Nostalgia’ plays with time itself—a childhood photograph embedded within layers of texture, two small figures standing against sunlit grass, thick with yellow-green hues. The details are sharp, yet the essence feels distant, as if recalled through the haze of a dream. They stand still, yet the moment feels in motion, stretched by diagonal shadows that extend beyond the frame. Their faces are obscured—covered by a single pressed yellow flower in an act of protection, erasure, or perhaps an offering to the past, an acknowledgment that identity is always shifting. Lavender buds and cut-out figures float weightlessly—a reminder that memory, too, is slippery, never static, always just out of reach 🪻

In ‘Veisalgia, Persephone’, a pomegranate, red as longing, presses against an expanse of blue—a colour that could be deep water, or the vastness of forgetting. A skull-like form emerges, its presence ghostly, half-seen. Nearby, rows of lentils—an echo of ancient rituals, of sustenance offered to the departed.

There is a deeply tender mourning—a celebration on how we carry our histories within us: in the body, the mind, and the spaces we once inhabited ✿” –Scarlet Thomas   @luminosa.artsscene


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I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the unceded lands on which I live, the peoples of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung, Bunurong/Boon Wurrung, and Dja Dja Wurrung language groups of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respects to their Elders past and present.