Studio Notes · Oct 2025
Hello all,
Thank you, and welcome to new friends who joined the list after the Philadelphia Open Studio Tour (POST) two weekends ago. It was wonderful to meet many of you in the studio and spend time in conversation.
Here is October’s Studio Notes. Each month, I share a small dispatch reflecting on what’s been on my mind, what I’ve been working on in the studio, and what’s been moving through the heart of the practice. You can browse previous entries here if you’re curious.
As always, my heartfelt thanks to you all for following along. Hoşçakalın! 🧿
Seher
Visiting the Ishak Pasha Palace in Sivas, Turkey, 2015.
ON MY MIND
Thresholds.
For the past three years, my undergraduate architecture students at the University of Pennsylvania have begun the fall semester with a project called Thresholds.
For the purposes of this project, we define architectural thresholds as spaces of transition—links between multiple areas, mediators between different conditions, states, or experiences. These are often in-between zones that connect inside and outside. Many of the most compelling architectural spaces for me are, in fact, threshold conditions.
For this project, students search Penn’s campus for sites that reveal these qualities. It is an exercise in close looking—learning to notice how the designed environment is constructed and how complexity is embedded in the everyday. Thresholds are rarely singular or straightforward. They resist easy categorization. They hold ambiguity. They allow multiple readings. They reveal uncertainty. All that good stuff.
And the instructor in me wonders how this very practical exercise in architectural study—taking measurements, making drawings, building models—might also offer a framework of sorts to practice facing more intangible challenges of life. Are the questions they’re grappling with the “good hard” kind—not difficult for difficulty’s sake, but the kind that helps guide them through murkier, stickier paths, creating new openings?
WITH MY HANDS
27 x 27.
Last year’s Devotion series began as small pencil drawings in my sketchbook and gradually scaled up into larger works in oil pastel (all collected here). In the latter half of this year, I’ve been exploring how those drawings might translate into three dimensional wall pieces combining ceramic and wool, my beloved duo.
This is a new direction for me. In earlier work, the ceramic surface acted as the ground and wool as an accent. Here, I’ve been searching for a more equal relationship between the two—how they might meet in a dynamic equilibrium rather than one dominating the other.
One-inch square ceramic tiles alternate with loosely woven wool strands, arranged in a 27 x 27 grid. That’s 729 individual squares and eleven different configurations of how the ceramic and wool interact, creating a shifting mosaic of glossy, deep blue surfaces and softer, earthy textures.
It is a labor-intensive process, one that requires planning and patience. And still, I don’t fully know what I’ll find on the other side of it. I ask myself: Does this composition achieve the dialogue I am seeking between the two materials? Does it hold a balance in which shapes seem to emerge and then recede as the eye moves across the surface? Does it invite me in, and then draw me through?that I’ve joined InLiquid, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit artist community that has been supporting and connecting artists since the 1990s and maintains a vibrant presence in the city.
I joined because I’m looking to build more connections in the art world and to meet other artists whose paths I might not cross otherwise. I’m looking forward to the conversations and collaborations that can grow from being part of this community.
If you’d like to see more of my work, you can visit my profile page here.
Two dear friends CJ and Naima visiting during the Philadelphia Open Studio event.
FROM THE HEART
Moving Through.
I’ve been slowly making my way through Susan Cain’s Bittersweet—a book about how the tendency to hold both longing and beauty together at the same time can be generative of creative work. The invitation to embrace paradox landed right on time, just as my open studio weekend arrived.
During those two days, I found myself telling the story behind the work over and over (my studio mate Riley could probably recite it by heart now!). Last year was a difficult one personally, and for a long stretch I couldn’t make the work I wanted to make (or I thought I should make). Months passed without touching clay. The absence felt loaded, and I kept thinking about how I needed a “breakthrough.”
And then, almost quietly, all that nervous energy and all that longing gathered and turned into a late-summer season of making.
I share this not to self-congratulate or to reinforce the message that we must always be visibly productive to feel okay. Rather, I want to remind my future self that when I find myself in a lull, change is always underway, even if imperceptibly. We are always moving through. Those in-between states are not a detour or a failure of momentum; they are the work—the good hard kind.
Until next month, hoşçakalın!