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GÖZDE İLKIN at work in her studio during her visual arts residency at Pioneer Works, New York, supported by the SAHA Association in Istanbul. Courtesy the artist.
Gözde İlkin has been a wanderer all her life. The artist is best known for creating painted and embroidered mixed-media pieces, as well as drawings and artists’ books about imaginary places inhabited by nomadic beings. Born in an agricultural area of Turkey in 1981, İlkin’s family moved from city to city while she was young. She continued to travel after completing her undergraduate studies in painting in 2004, and later, as she pursued educational programs and artist residencies in Europe.
After journeying on an 18-day road trip with a group of artists to Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran in 2009, İlkin began to focus her work on
issues of immigration, frontiers and the relationship between neighbors. ArtAsiaPacific recently spoke with the artist at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, where she is currently an artist-in-residence, to discuss the ideas and processes that she employs in her practice, her time in Brooklyn, and her fabric works in the group show presented by New York’s Franklin Parrasch Gallery and Cairo-based Gypsum as part of Condo New York.
When did you first learn embroidery?
I started stitching around 2004, but not as a technique in itself or a medium. I just started to stitch as a way to draw. It’s a very organic process for me.
When and why did you start using this sewing technique to create artworks?
After completing my Bachelor’s degree in painting, I started to work at home. When my grandmother died, I had some of her fabrics on hand and began to add figures and forms to them. I was able to change my feeling of mourning to one of remembrance. This transformation became a ritual. I began to connect to stories from the past through these materials. Sharing the memory of my grandmother with people became an important part of the process. Her fabrics became the means for me to transform a personal recollection into a collective memory.
What subjects did you address in your early sewn works and what were you trying to express with them?
For the earliest works, I took photographs depicting objects and figures at home. As a sort of investigation, I would pose the questions, “How do we settle in a place like home and adapt our feelings or bodies to it?” or “How do we stage our identity?” Taking self-portraits, I would position my body, interacting with furniture and domestic fabrics, in a slightly abstract way. I worked from these images, which were somewhat influenced by photographers Francesca Woodman, Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun.
At the same time, I studied the celebratory photographs from our family albums. I tried to read the relationships and gender codes between the figures from the poses. Then I started to transform the figures into abstract or absurd forms, which helped me to portray family relationships. This series of works, which was shown in artSümer Gallery in Istanbul in 2010, was titled “Please Clear the Dance Floor!” (2009). The title expresses a desire to be left alone with my memories.
How did you become interested in issues of immigration?
My family moved from city to city in Turkey. Between 1984 and 1998, we moved every two years. I learned to adapt, make new relationships, and discover different cultures and traditions. With each new place, we settled with our personal objects and traditional fabrics and made it our home. We gained a sense of belonging by learning how to adapt as strangers. Memories of these times led me to think about border-related issues.
Where do you now find the fabrics you use and what part do they play in your work?
I travel a lot and find fabrics at flea markets or second-hand stores in the countries that I visit. I use the fabric as a ground or a stage for
my ideas and images. I try to find a nest for my characters and forms by choosing certain patterns that feel right for my subjects. Found materials have their own layers of memory, and working with these materials helps me spark contact between past and present.
Does your training in painting inform your work?
I sketch daily with acrylic on paper—sometimes adding other materials, such as notes, posters and papers from the street. Found words and poems often inspire the forms and figures I paint. This process helps me construct the relationships between different elements. Then I fabricate the figures from my sketches on the textiles and stitch the motifs by hand.
Who are the figures that you portray in these sewn and painted works?
I usually start from family photographs, but while working with them they begin to address larger ideas about family issues and feelings of belonging—thus losing their specific identity. I’m most interested in turning a personal memory into a collective one, whether it’s through transforming photographic subjects or the use of vintage fabrics, which can trigger a range of memories for other people.
You are also using photography for some of the digitally printed imagery that you add to your sewn pictures, right?
Photography and collage play a role in my work through printed fabric and patterned material. For example, as an ongoing project in the Pioneer Works studio, I started to work on a large, printed fabric. There’s a repeated motif of stone that suggests some sort of geography, landscape or imaginary place. The printed fabric becomes a map to guide my actions with forms, words and stories.
What are your figures’ relationships to their surrounding landscapes, and in particular to plant-life, such as that in Reverie of Space (2017)?
I am interested in plant life as well as the natural processes and strategies of plants as a means to depict social relationships, and to reflect on different methods for people to live together.
You are currently in residence at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, which is known for promoting experimental practices. What is it like to work in this environment?
In 2016, I began using natural dyes to stain fabrics and paper to create unexpected organic patterns and colors. In this first series, “Nook,” I outlined forms and figures, which appear in the stains. The figures settle on traces of plants, as though they are in a nook or a nest.
When I came to Brooklyn for the Pioneer Works residency, I started to study the plants in the neighborhood. As a daily practice, I’ve been dying paper and thinking about the resulting shapes as though they were characters. I joined a workshop organized by artist Marisa Prefer, the Pioneer Works gardener. She teaches us about the wild plants and their strategies for existence. The walks we take also help me to learn about the surrounding area through plants.
By chance, your work is also on view in a group show at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, as part of the gallery share event Condo New York, where your Cairo gallery Gypsum is presenting an installation of your sewn and painted pieces mixed with a selection of your drawings. What are you trying to convey to the viewer with this series of works, which you have titled Found Landscape (2017– )?
This series began in January 2017, when I was in a residency program at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. I started to track a feeling of “home” throughout the city. I found this sensibility with the homeless and with foreigners to the city. Each of their traces informed my own process and I started to work from what I witnessed. To make this series, I’ve collected found fabrics from my recently visited cities, including Paris, Berlin and New York.
I’m exploring such questions as, “How are habits and feelings revealed in a landscape or place?” and “How do we make our personal landscapes and find our roots somewhere in there?” I’ve created works like Local Stranger, Remote Possibility (both 2018), and others, which depict possibilities, distances and feelings of being lost in translation.
Are your titles poetic or political?
I am influenced by literature, performance and cinema, which have helped me see words as a different kind of form. I focus on the word for its feeling. My titles are usually shaped poetically to reflect family structures, power dynamics, urban life, the gender gap and social processes.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Gözde İlkin’s work is on view at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, until July 27, 2018.
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