Studio Notes · June 2024
An example of a central Anatolian kilim rug found in Kayseri, Turkey, estimated to be made in 1800s.
ON MY MIND
What does she have to say?
Christopher Alexander is very well known in architecture and design theory circles for his book titled A Pattern Language and more. Yet many of his readers would be surprised to learn of another, fairly obscure, publication called A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets. A long title for a big book dedicated to Alexander’s own private collection of Anatolian rugs (the largest in the world!).
I came across this gem of a collection in 2016 as I was looking for ways to tie in my deep-seated interest in Anatolian kilim rugs with an architectural research project. Alexander’s elegant sketches of the visual language embedded in the rugs reveal “design secrets”: complexity of centers, overlaid symmetries, ambivalence of negative and positive spaces and multiplicity of scales. No matter how inspiring, the book did not clear a path for an academic inquiry for me, but it has resonated as an epic, bold, if a little mystifying manifesto of sorts on the power of the rug patterns on the viewer.
In fact, by the end, Alexander leaves the realm of visual analysis and offers a spiritual claim: some of the finest examples of these rugs reflect the “oneness of the universe.” (He is not alone here. The Sufis also believe prayer rugs to be a reflection of God.)
While Alexander’s ideas mostly concern the relationship between the rug and the viewer, I wonder about the weavers themselves—all women, now entirely anonymous as the creators. If, as Alexander suggests, the viewer can find the Higher Self embedded in the imagery, where does that place the woman who created the rug? How does her labor gathering traditional motifs in new ways to configure unique forms of self expression belong here? What messages were encoded into the intricacies of this ancient language when it was very likely the only “platform” for self-expression for her and her female contemporaries?
A four-piece composition I made in 2021, titled Hero.
WITH MY HANDS
Hero.
My production process with clay typically begins by drawing a regularized, visual order on a ceramic slab (whether a grid or a more varied pattern) and then complicating it by introducing slight aberrations from the norm— misalignments, scale shifts, gestural marks.
Clay is more cooperative when carved in fluid motions rather than cut into precise geometric shapes with sharp corners and thin lines. So, most often, I find myself negotiating with the material to find just the right moment of dryness and just the right angle of a cut to reproduce a drawing on paper.
While it is a process of being in dialogue with the material — a give and take of my vision and what the physical medium will yield —admittedly, the power dynamic is not equal. In craft practice, no matter how skilled and attentive the human hand might be and how eager to push the edges, I find that the physical, material reality determines the actual boundaries.
The wall sculpture above was one of my earlier studies where I was working with a traditional kilim motif —the “ram’s horn”— to create a multi-piece composition. The ram’s horn signifies power and heroism, and I was exploring tiling operations of the motif to establish a pattern in which I could play with scale to incorporate multiplicity and difference—my idea of a powerful structure. In simple terms, I was looking for new spaces within the old patterns. And as I look at the final assembly that I titled Hero, in the shadow of the relief, I see even more possibilities. Here is to celebrating the quiet but strong voices all around us.
A snapshot of the current state of my pin-up wall.
FROM THE HEART
This is a gathering.
As I write these words in my studio, I am in between moving from typing to drawing to organizing stuff — all activities I consider part of my process of creating a new collection of 12 wall pieces.
Since our schedules with my dear studio-mate Riley do not often overlap, I am typically by myself in the studio. It is thrilling and lonely work to be creating alone, somewhat lost in a cloud of ideas and feeling my way through lots of small and big decisions. This, it strikes me, stands in a stark contrast to the communal experience of the Anatolian weavers dipping in and out of conversation with each other. Grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and daughters all sharing space while working on their own pieces (and consuming a lot of tea, no doubt!).
Weaving in this way is a communion with heritage — each pattern is based on an older “sibling” rug from a previous generation. Through weaving, the women interconnect ancestral knowledge and symbolism with their own lives and individual needs for self-expression. So, each rug becomes an overlapping reflection of dual timelines: one of centuries-deep culture encoded through motifs and composition, and another of days spent in creative labor, knot by knot.
Imagining the weavers makes me realize something about my own hours in studio. As I work through my own visual language —in part inherited and in part expressive—when I’m “in the thick of it,” despite the quiet of my work space, I find the quality of my process to be less a solo endeavor and more like an ongoing conversation with the past and possible futures, over tea.
Until next month, hoşçakalın!