Kırmızı Bahçe / Red Garden, 2023
2023, oya (needle lace) on a string, with blue fragment from garbage bag or shoe cover, a bunch of silver coloured wires, my mother’s hair, fragment from cotton rope (?), frayed piece of green laundry rope, pigeon feather, aluminum foil, copy of the last page from my sister’s journal, adhesive bandage that my son put on my finger for a knife cut, red ribbon, piece of marine rope I found on the beach in İzmir, white laundry rope untied from the gate between the front garden and backyard of the apartment building I lived in as a child, fibres from broom (?), silver wire, fragment of bracelet handed out at family diaspora picnic. 29x23 inches, framed

Red Garden is part of a series created using oya, an intricate lace technique traditional to Anatolia (Turkey), made through knotting. Often used to adorn the edges of scarves worn by women, oya carries a rich iconography that reveals a marginalized relationship with the limits of language. The motifs embedded in trimmings serve as symbolic expressions—messages that hover between the spoken and the unspoken, the personal and the collective.

This work was created in response to a suicide attempt in my close family. Here, lace becomes a thread of associative connections, weaving together objects—most of which I gathered from the backyard of my childhood home in Istanbul, a repository of fallen, lost, and forgotten things. By assembling these objects, Red Garden reflects on the intergenerational transmissions of grief and joy within my family—an exploration of what is inherited, what is carried, and what, perhaps, can be mended.

Related works: Pepper Mountain, Flower and Pepper, Pepper Garden