Light on a Long Thin Wire

Gülay Semercioglu

Like any painter, light is at the heart of the matter for Gülay Semercioglu. The difference is that she does not use paint. Working with metal filament, this Turkish artist’s intricate wire tapestries are transformed by light into vibrant compositions that gleam like iridescent peacock tails. “My whole struggle is with light and how I can control it – the same issue painters have faced throughout the history of art,” says Semercio lu. “Whatever it is that a painter seeks to do in his or her work, I am trying to do the same with wire, with the same emotion.”

Kaleidoscopic Energy

An obsession for Rembrandt and Monet, light was, and is, synonymous with goodness, beauty and the secrets of the universe. Painters capture it by suspending pigments in oily
liquid then smearing them on cloth with a brush. Semercio lu’s light comes from glossy enamel wire hardly thicker than strands of human hair. Her ‘canvases’ are wooden planks across which the wire is stretched taut, held together by small crosshead screws. From a distance, the work is a plane, but up close, the viewer discovers that each work is thick in texture, composed of as many as 20 layers of wire, like the innards of several pianos stripped of everything but their strings. Just as light rebounds off the paint on the surface of a Rothko canvas, so it does from Semercio lu’s wires. As the particles hurtle towards the retina, a spectrum of tones emerges from her monochromatic work, changes appear in the hue, and distinct shapes emerge as the viewer moves around it. It is reminiscent of the shifts in form and colour of a well-made silken prayer rug or the inside of a fancy suit jacket.

Although Semercioglu’s works are three-dimensional, even nominally sculptural, she says they bear the same hallmarks as paintings. “As long as you can hang it on the wall, it is a picture,” she says. “I consider all of my work to be pictures.” Wire offers Semercio lu a scale and scope not afforded by paint. “As the venue changes, or as the viewer changes place, or even as the degree of light changes, my work is new and different. To do this with paint is extremely difficult, but wire makes my pictures kinetic.”

The roots of the 41-year-old artist’s painterly approach lie in her training at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts, established in Istanbul in 1882. She earned a BA in painting and an MA in social sciences, completing her studies in 1998. During her early years at Mimar Sinan, Semercio lu worked primarily with oil and acrylic paints to create large works of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines with geometrical patterns. “I was very happy doing paintings, and I wasn’t bad as a painter, but paint didn’t suffice in terms of what I wanted to express. I wanted to go beyond illusions,” says Semercio lu. “I was always thinking and painting abstractly and minimally, but I wanted to use material that was more realistic; something you could touch and feel. I wanted to paint, I just didn’t want to use paints.”

Encouraged by an intrepid studio teacher at Mimar Sinan to explore other material and media, Semercio lu began experimenting with wood, but soon found it was not pliant enough and switched to aluminium plates. “The procession was to move to material that got thinner and thinner,” she explains. “Eventually I wanted to weave, but it couldn’t be string. That would have been too ordinary.” One day, Semercio lu took a stroll through the Per embe Bazaar, a daily street market in the Golden Horn district of Karaköy that specialises in home-improvement hardware. Amid the stacks of taps, miles of piping and stalls of drill bits and tools, she came upon a vendor selling coloured wires typically used for industrial purposes. Semercio lu had found her method and her means. Some seven years later, she senses her work is now veering inexorably towards sculpture or even larger manifestations, and believes that architecture, and not other art, informs her pictures. “For years now, my work has benefitted from architecture’s forms,” she says. “Buildings are sculptures to me. As I take small steps towards sculpting, I think I will wind up designing buildings.”

Visual Trickery

Structural design can be spotted in Green Square, from 2006. For the world, it looks like a richly panelled door. Verdigris wires are underlain with gold, a departure from Semercioglu’s monochromatic palette. The clean, crisp lines are still fluid and vivid, the chiaroscuro determined by which way she has chosen to place each layer of wire. Up close, Green Leaf, from 2009, has the sweep of a Frank Gehry roof, and a lashing S-curve bisects the frame. Its wires shimmer like the feathers of a hummingbird. The twill of painstakingly tied green wires plays opto-kinetic tricks on the eye, which darts over the surface from light to dark areas, trying to work out which way is up and which is down. “I love a paradigm,” Semercioglu says, and her panels can arouse a strange ambivalence in their audience.

Like all of her work, these emerald efforts are elaborate, sombre and clearly labour-intensive. Semercio lu often uses eight kilometres or more of wire for a single panel. If she works 12 hours a day, she can complete a piece in three to four weeks. That is less than 15 works a year. “If I don’t touch every inch of my work, then it doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. I need to be convinced that it’s mine or I’m not gratified, and that’s partly because I love the craft of art,” she says. It’s a filial legacy. Her grandfather’s handmade silken garments have been preserved to this day in family trousseaus, and her grandmother made elaborate necklaces – with wire.

Semercio lu’s work more than tips its hat to the handicrafts so beloved of Turks: the back-breaking, sightdestroying geometry of carpet weaving or the slavish repetition of motifs on the ceramic tiles gracing the walls of mosquesand palaces. The more effort that goes into production, the more awe it sparks in the observer. “There is a thin line between artists and artisans,” she affirms. “Like an acrobat, you walk that line, and I like to play with it. I don’t want to separate the two, because they exist within each other,” she says. “I work for hours upon hours on a single piece and I have a technical hand skill, and that is the craft of my work. To be an artist is to always discover something new. My work is constantly searching, pushing the boundaries.”

In a Muslim country traditionally bereft of a figurative visual repertoire, the audience is comfortable with her abstraction, even if it is Western idea. Semercioglu, who lived for a few years in The Netherlands, Germany and Belgium during her childhood, feels she and other Turkish artists benefit from a perch that overlooks both East and West. “Our advantage is that we know both sides,” she says. “We are Eastern, but we live facing the West. This synthesis nourishes us. I have brought together both of these senses, I am of both places.”

At the moment, East and West resonate with buyers. Semercioglu began showing overseas in 2006, and already examples of her work are in private collections in the USA, China, the UAE and Europe. She is represented locally by Pi Artworks, by Galerie Kashya Hildebrand (page 102) in Zurich and by the Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery (Canvas 5.4) in New York.

Brave New World

The appeal is also in the aesthetics that evoke 1960s Minimalism and Op art, even though her devotion to craft and design anchors her work firmly in Bauhaus. Semercioglu, who has taught art at two Istanbul universities, adores Bauhaus but criticises the movement’s typecasting of women. “It discriminated against women, directing them to studios that produced handicrafts, while men designed buildings and furniture,” she says.

With Abstract art, Semercioglu has ventured deep into male territory. She does not consider herself a political artist, but still seeks to challenge Turkey’s male-dominated society. Her capitonné creations were inspired by fellow Turkish artist Altan Gürman’s anti-militarist work that also incorporated the quilted upholstery. “When you enter the office of a governor or mayor anywhere in Turkey, there will always be the capitonné on the wall, and on his desk, a diary and a pen holder in the same matching colour of leather. It’s hard, it’s masculine, it’s the symbol of male dominance. At first, my message with this form may have been anti-authoritarian, but it has changed,” says Semercio lu. Now she opts to use symbols specific to Anatolia, celebrating Seljuk history or motifs that represent its women within the buttons. “There may be hints of politics in my capitonné work, but more than being political, it has to do with women and their rights. It is about my own sexual identity and the constraints placed on women in this society. So my art is more social commentary than political,” she explains.

One sharp rebuke comes from Töre, from 2006. It references the brutal honour killing of a young woman from eastern Turkey, where Semercioglu’s family traces its roots.

The work is sobering. Silver-coloured aluminium threads form the proverbial doormat but instead of the word for ‘welcome’, (meaning morals in Turkish), töre has become shorthand for honour killings and is spelled out. The semiotics of a domestic, everyday object is subverted by the menacing, steel-like mesh. Other Semercioglu pieces are deliberately, delightfully feminine. The slender crescent in Purple Times, from 2009, harkens to Lucio Fontana’s erotic apertures, and 2008’s Twins suggests two foetuses curled up in their mother’s womb. Green Light, from 2009, recalls Georgia O’Keefe notorious irises. And without irises, there’s not much to see. There is no light.