Turkey

Shaped by Water, 2022. Mixed media installation, variable dimensions.

Shaped by Water is composed of styrofoam pieces salvaged from desolate beaches and caves along the Marmara and Black Sea coasts, accessed by a row boat. Their size, density, colours, and physical condition yield vital clues about their journey, from production to discard. For instance their colours and thickness are revealing of their lineages as construction material, shipping crates used in the fishing industry, or as food packaging, just as the pockmarks on their surface suggest futile predations by seagulls. Greeting their obsolete buoyancy with a child's sense of wonder, is the artist's way of practicing what the American philosopher Donna Haraway calls living with the trouble' and of generating an economy of waste. In a post-modernist move, the work expands its authorship through an ostension of extra-artistic agencies from cascading forces of water, to the metal oxides found in certain rocks that impart specific colours to the styrofoam, to the corrosive effects of bird droppings.