The use of fabric and sewing techniques as art materials in the works of Gozde Ilkin and Gunesh Terkol

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The use of fabric and sewing techniques as art materials in the works of Gozde Ilkin and Gunesh Terkol

Erkan Nilufer,

PhD Student at the Art Criticism Department Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Arts (Baku, Azerbaijan)

In the modern art environment in Turkey, women artists have tried to reflect what they see, think, understand and assimilate in the social environment of the society in which they live, with people and women, through the works of art they create. In contemporary art, where the concept of art prevails over aesthetics, they used objects found in everyday life. Each material they used had a different style. In the 21st century, innovations in many areas have made a significant difference in art, bringing with it a different style, new ideas and new materials. Traditional rules, such as painting and sculpture on canvas, have been violated, and new and rich expressions have been found in the modern art space with technological advances. Along with the spread of the use of alternative materials, founded by Marshall Duchamp in the twentieth century, sewing, one of the oldest handicraft techniques, is one of the methods we encounter as a new style in the modern art environment. The sewing technique used by many artists around the world, including Tracy Emin, Natasha Kerr, Susan Stockwell, and Grayson Perry, has been a technique and language of art used in the works of Gozde Ilkin and Gunesh Terkol in Turkey. The stories in the works of Gunesh Terkol and Gozde Ilkin are embroidered like embroidery as belonging to our world. The multiple moods and fascinating personalities of the abstracted figures are before us, prompting us to look at them. The theatrical and Metaphorical personas are as charming as they are charmingly volatile and quirky. In Ilkin's installation, which resembles a film screen where some imaginary images appear and disappear, the artist examines dual situations. It reveals the balance created by dualistic concepts such as body-spirit, mind-heart, happiness-sadness in a holistic existence. Gunesh Terkol, who was selected as the performing artist for the Akbank printing workshop in the winter of2019-2020, includes her works, which she realized for the first time in her career, by using the printing technique instead of the embroidery technique, in this installation. marshall duchamp turkey art

Key words: Gozde Ilkin, Gunesh Terkol, Female artist, fabric, sewing technique.

Introduction

Gozde Ilkin, one of the most important representatives of the younger generation in this field, chose sewing and dyeing techniques in her works. She made her paintings, especially old family drawings, by sewing them on canvas with fabrics and threads of the appropriate color. As a material, she used needles and stalks instead of brushes and paints, and fabrics such as curtains, sheets and tablecloths instead of canvas. In addition to fabric, the artist also made paper and other materials. In her works, along with sewing, black pencil drawings and paintings, she tried to express social and political relations, power issues, gender segregation and the issue of changing the city mainly through pictures, videos and installations. (Artam Global Art & Design 2017, 45: 120-121; Ozlem, 2011a: 167, 55; Kaygusuz Burcu Gunay, 2021).

Discussion

One of the most important works of the artist is her work “Special Passport”, created in 2009, which reflects the borders, migration and crossborder relations (ill. 1). With this work, she criticized the expression of a person only in writing and figures on paper in the context of political relations, which are the second border between countries and, whether or not they prevent the transition. In another work, The Bosphorus Tour, which combines two separate pieces in 2015, the artist sought to reflect the impact of the social and political phase of recent history on the transformation of the city (ill. 2). In her work on the Bosphorus, a repetition of Istanbul's symbols, she analyzed the first part of the city's transformation on the basis of the part that created it, and the phase of the collapse through the assurance of another part that created the part.

In her works, the artist made fabrics that belong to the house and are mostly memorable from the family. She said in an interview with the National Art Magazine about her work by painting and sewing parts of pieces in different patterns; “I can say for myself that I am building the words and scenes that make up the sentence of the stage I live in”, she said. “Sewing, conveying and creating ideas is often a means of expressing the situation in drawings or even three-dimensional works <...> When I try to express the situation, I re-live the past by sewing. I mostly plan new scenes from previous family photos or shots from someone's life. From the pictures in each family, I sometimes create a series of pictures that I plan to take. I create my sewing work mainly on home fabrics such as curtains, sheets, and knots, which I remember, using paint and needle thread” (Ozlem, 2011b: 55). Materials such as cloth, needles and thread, which are considered to be a handicraft and we sometimes use in everyday life, have been the means of expression in the artist's work.

Gozde Ilkin has prepared a series called “Destroyed House” as part of the 15th Istanbul Exhibition in 2017. She created the “Destroyed House” series with fabric and memorabilia belonging to her family, such as curtains, sheets, tablecloths belonging to her family, and old photos from the family album. In her works, she used old pictures of the past and personal photos taken at weddings, pictures of men in the military, pictures of men eating each other, and again used these images intertwined with pieces from the past (ill. 3), The artist reflected the customs of the society with the traditional materials of the past used in her works, and emphasized the social rules and visual images in the form of rules.

Gunesh Terkol, who used sewing techniques in her work, used textile products and techniques there. She used mainly thin fabric as material. The artist used these

Ill.2. Gozde ilkin “The Bosphorus Tour”. 2015. 14,5 x9,5 sm. 22 sahifa.

Printing, sewing and painting, sound, hazirlanmasi.2,82x12,20 m.

Ill. 3. Gozde ilkin. “Destroyed stuff - Destroyed home series”. 2017. Hand stitching and painting on the box materials, first by coloring them with natural dyes, and then by soaking them in the sun. During the dyeing process, the artist used mainly vegetables in addition to chemicals, and painted the pieces one by one with vegetables such as onion peel, spinach, beets, and walnut shells. The artist spoke about the relationship between the sexes as a subject in hher work on sewing fabrics. (Artam Global Art & Design, 2017, 42: 82).

Handicrafts such as sewing, embroidery and fabric scraps have taken the form of expression and technicality in the artist's work. In these works, she tried to express her criticism of social sex and foreign behavior. Gunesh Terkol said this in an interview with Guler inje in the December 2016 issue of the Istanbul Art News Newspaper; “I have always been fascinated by feminist patterns that have turned sewing into a form of struggle, a simple and everyday affair. The main issue in my works is women. In addition, I prepare my works in the workshop, appreciating the fabric and sewing as a poster. In Antakya, Istanbul, Chongqing, Vienna, and Berlin, the examples in the posters we created for different female participants in the direction of feminist ideas became the basis for new dialogues in which we shared and constructed our words. In our joint works, which preserve individual expressions at the stage of collective thought, we visualize the different sociological processes, economic foundations and the society in which we live in relation to the expressions of the participants” (Istanbul Art News, 2016a: 16). Analyzing the relationship between the sexes with a wide range of materials, such as sewing, black pencil drawings, video and sound, Gunesh Terkol's works are about women who do not obey the prohibitions in society, reject them and their rising voices and struggle in today's fast-changing world.

Gunesh Terkol, who uses mainly black, white and red colors in her works, which are as thin as tulle, which seems to fall apart at any moment (ill. 4,5), said this in an interview with Guler ince in the Istanbul Art News newspaper in December 2016: “The reason I use black and white is because the figures or plant patterns I use without mentioning the location create a common world or intertwine when they come together. I dried some of the work I did with red paint at different times in the sun and got different tones. Blood represents different shades of color, that is, the passage of life and the color change it creates on the human body. In addition, I try to use natural materials when painting. For example, the color of onion is a color that paints us inside and above, and reflects tears in itself. In addition, I make dreams, spells, figures with the colors I get from spinach, walnut shells and tobacco leaves” (Istanbul Art News, 2016b: 16).

The artist, who criticizes social issues in her work, has four female figures side by side in “4th curtain” (2014). In this work, which depicts four female figures in a black fabric on a white cloth with sewing techniques, the images of women raising, demanding, or defending their voices for their freedom are emphasized. In 2016, she created a creature adorned

Ill. 5. Gunesh Terkol. “Under the ground”. 2016.

with an earthworm by sewing it on a piece of red cloth like tulle, embroidering it on a piece of cloth she painted red (ill. 5). She tried to exaggerate the violence in the world with the red color she used in her work, which she sewed on a completely red tulle (§a§mazer, 2021).

Gunesh Terkol's works were shaped by social and political rules. Among her works were poster projects. The poster project, which she made using fabric and sewing techniques, appeared as a visual result of her workshop work in various places, such as Turkey, China and Germany. The artist made fabric poster projects collectively with female participants. In the poster projects, women, IDPs and young people living in different places reflected their dreams, hopes, fears, worries, thoughts and struggles for the future (ill. 6,7),

The result of the artist's seven poster projects was the poster “Home is My Heart”. She worked on a piece of paper 200x300 cm for this poster “Home is My Heart”, which she prepared for Art Night London, the annual festival of contemporary art in London (ill. 6). This work, which is a poster for street protests made of scraps of fabric, was made by sewing different colored pieces of fabric. Visualized in the form of a street protest, the work contained black female figures and word frames scattered between

Ill. 7

the figures, as well as texts (inscriptions) within these frames. “My home is my heart” is a visual reflection of the difference between a woman and a man, who are content with the inside of the house and between the house and the outside of the house.

Gune§ Terkol's work on a piece called “Beautiful Days”, which depicts a female figure with wings, was a workshop with the participation of women who were forced to move to Istanbul for various reasons (ill. 7). In her book “Beautiful Days” prepared in 2017, she analyzed the living conditions and dreams of women who came to Istanbul from different backgrounds in a collective art. The artist depicts a female figure spreading her wings towards beautiful days in her fabric works made of various materials. This work, which reveals the burden of life and being a woman, is an old and summary of the society in which we live. The image of a struggling woman is reflected in the weaving techniques typical of women.

The conditions of the social environment lived around the common theme in the works of the artists with the technique of sewing on the fabric. They tried to reflect what they saw, thought, understood and mastered in connection with the social environment in their society, man and woman, with the works of art they created.

BОBLОOGRAPHY

1. Artam Global Art & Design. Number: 42. Istanbul : Antik A.§. Publication, 2017. 180 p.

2. Artam Global Art & Design. Number: 45. Istanbul : Antik A.§.Yayini, 2017. 176 p.

3. Istanbul Art News. Turkey's Art and Culture Newspaper. Interval, 2016.

4. Gьrsel Derya. „Gьne§ Terkol ile „Evim Kalbimdir“ ьzerine“. URL: https://www.unlimitedrag.com/post/gunes-terkol- ile-evim-kalbimdir-uzerine (date of access: 02.11.2021).

5. Kaygusuz Burcu Gьnay. “Kuma§ Ьzerine озlenen Hikayeler”. S. 891-899. URL: https://www.idildergisi.com/makale/ pdf/1566407636.pdf (date of access: 02.11.2021).

6. Meriз Derya, Kozbekзi Selda. “Gelenek-Gelecek Iliзkisinin 21. Yьzyil Tekstil Sanatina Kavramsal Aзidan Yansimalari”. S. 417-428. URL: https://www.ulakbilge.com/makale/pdf/1567184964.pdf (date of access: 02.11.2021).

7. Unsal Ozlem. “Is contemporary art a sewing box?” Milliyet Sanat. 2011. Number: 624. P. 54-55.

8. §a§mazer Nilьfer. “Цrtьler, цrьntьler ve цykьler”. S. 16-26. URL: https://www.unlimitedrag.com/post/2016/12/29/ ortuleroruntulerveoykuler (date of access: 02.11.2021).

REFERENCES

1. Artam Global Art & Design. Number: 42. Istanbul: Antik A.§. Publication.2017,180 p. [in English].

2. Artam Global Art & Design. Number: 45. Istanbul: Antik A.§.Yaymi.2017,176 p. [in English].

3. Istanbul Art News. Turkey's Art and Culture Newspaper. Interval, 2016. [in English].

4. Gьrsel Derya. “Gьne§ Terkol ile `Evim Kalbimdir' ьzerine [On `My Home is My Heart' with Gьne§ Terkol] https://www.unlimitedrag.com/post/gunes-terkol-ile-evim-kalbimdir-uzerine. 2.11.2021. [in Turkish].

5. Kaygusuz Burcu Gьnay, “Kuma§ Ьzerine озlenen Hikayeler” [Stories Embroidered on Fabric] pp. 891-899. (https://www.idildergisi.com/makale/pdf/1566407636.pdf). 2.11.2021.

6. Meriз Derya, Kozbekзi Selda, “Gelenek-Gelecek Iliзkisinin 21. Yьzyil Tekstil Sanatina Kavramsal Aзidan Yansimalari” [Conceptual Reflections of Tradition-Future Relationship to 21st Century Textile Art]. pp. 417-428. (https://www.ulakbilge.com/makale/pdf/1567184964.pdf) [inTurkish]. 2.11.2021.

7. Unsal Ozlem. “Is contemporary art a sewing box?” Milliyet Sanat, number: 624, 2011. pp. 54-55. [in English].

8. §a§mazer Nilьfer. “Ortьler, фrьntьler ve фykьler” [Covers, patterns and stories] pp. 16-26. (https://www.unlimitedrag.com/post/2016/12/29/ortuleroruntulerveoykuler) 2.11.2021.

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