![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/10.-Scion.jpg\")
Colour, too, participates in this continuous flowering of matter. Milky pinks, aquatic greens, deep blues, pearlescent whites, and lustrous blacks do not function as decorative coatings. Rather, they seem to emerge from the work itself, as though the surface had slowly developed its own epidermis. The glazes adhere to the forms with an almost organic quality. Light glides across curves, gathers within cavities, and heightens the sensation that these objects possess an inner life. It is not only the form that grows; the colour grows as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This vitality, however, does not stem from a simple interest in nature. In Nermin Kura\u2019s work, nature is never observed as something external. It is a mode of thought. A grammar of transformation. Her works seem to share with the plant world not so much its appearance as its behaviour. They grow through layers. They proceed through successive expansions. They retain the memory of previous forms even as they generate new ones. Nothing is erased; everything continues to live within what follows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is here that the poetry of \u0130lhan Berk offers perhaps an unexpected point of proximity. In his verses, landscape is never merely landscape. Cities become bodies, bodies become gardens, and gardens become language. Likewise, in Kura\u2019s work, the vegetal world seems to transform itself into a sensitive language through which to speak of desire, vulnerability, growth, and metamorphosis. Flowers cease to belong to botany and enter a more ambiguous realm, where form exists in a continual state of becoming something else. Looking at certain works, one is led to think that what truly interests the artist is not the flower in its completed state, but the threshold of its appearance. That unstable moment in which something is still emerging and has not yet reached its final form. Many of her works seem to arrest a process that, in reality, continues. As though matter had retained the memory of its own movement. As though clay still remembered the gesture that brought it into being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This attention to becoming is also tied to the profound relationship Kura maintains with history. Her training as an art historian led her to spend years studying ceramics, floral motifs, and the decorative traditions of the Ottoman and Mediterranean worlds. Yet her work never presents itself as an exercise in historical retrieval. Nothing appears illustrative. Nothing takes on the character of quotation. Images from the past are not reproduced; they are absorbed until they become part of a personal language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For this reason, her relationship with the Ottoman tradition should be understood not as an iconographic repertoire, but as a sensibility. For centuries, within Ottoman visual culture, the flower did not occupy the margins of things. It constituted one of the privileged means through which to observe the world’s mutable order, its rhythms of growth, its silent transformations. From gardens to miniatures, from ceramics to architectural ornament, vegetal language moved across different forms and materials, giving expression to a particular attentiveness toward that which grows, unfurls, and continually renews itself. Kura inhabits this inheritance without ever turning it into a subject. She allows it to operate from within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps this is why time assumes such a particular quality in her work. One is naturally reminded of Ahmet Hamdi Tanp\u0131nar, for whom the past never truly disappears but continues to live within the present, like an underground current. Time seems to behave in much the same way in Kura\u2019s work. Her forms appear contemporary and ancient at once. They belong to the present, yet seem to hold within them far longer durations. Like certain seeds that remain buried for years, silently preserving their capacity to germinate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ultimately, what makes Nermin Kura\u2019s work so singular is perhaps precisely this ability to hold together things that appear far apart: study and intuition, history and imagination, ornament and organism, fragility and strength. Her ceramics do not represent nature; they share its breath. They do not describe growth; they grow. They do not depict flowering; they flower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And just as gardens never cease to transform, her forms, too, seem to remain open. Open to time, to the gaze, to memory. Open to that which they do not yet know about themselves. It is within this suspension between appearance and metamorphosis, between what is emerging and what has yet to emerge, that their deepest beauty continues to reside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your practice seems to move constantly between study, observation, and intuition. On various occasions, you have spoken about trusting what emerges during the making process rather than working from a fully defined plan. How much space do you leave for the unexpected when beginning a new work? And how do you recognize the moment when a form is leading you towards a direction you had not anticipated?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nermin Kura: It is true that I don\u2019t work from fully developed plans, I do however make rough sketches or collages before I start a piece, but always hope that unexpected paths will emerge while working. A variety of situations and prompts can lead to changing direction while shaping and watching a piece take shape. If the energy of the piece feels constricted at any moment due to either the inner space becoming too tight, a lack of flow in the curves of the silhouette, or an imbalance in the proportional ratios of the piece I will either add an element, recalibrate the proportions, change the width of the openings or widen an area, all of which can diverge from the preliminary sketch. I continually watch the flow of the works\u2019 curves, feel the thickness of their walls and listen to the resonance of their inner spaces for new cues to respond to. The excitement of following a new lead even if risky, is more enticing than advancing on familiar grounds. It is those \u201cwhat if\u201d moments that give a sense of breathlessness to the creative process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Accidents, however traumatic they might be, can also bring about most exciting ideas and offer radical opportunities for uninhibited experimentation. The collapse of a rim that you might have hit inadvertently while leaning over to grab a tool, as well as a crack or a glaze mishap occurring during a firing, can all lead to the discovery of new forms and creative salvaging strategies which can become a part of one\u2019s visual repertoire. I dare say that some of my most interesting work was born out of such fortuitous calamities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes new ideas will not be apparent right away. Every now and then, the kiln will give birth to a piece that will look like a failure to you in the moment. Interestingly, others may like it because they see it for what it is, while you only see it for what it is not. When this happens, it is best to shelf the work for a while and wait for the blueprint in your mind to fade. Then one day when you look at the piece again, it will speak to you in a new voice. This is a mysterious mechanism of perception. Do we just get used to the work over time or does it also evolve under our gaze? According to an old Turkish proverb “\u00fcz\u00fcm \u00fcz\u00fcme baka baka karar\u0131r”<\/em> which translates to \u201cgrapes darken by looking at one another”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before dedicating yourself fully to artistic practice, you spent several years as an art historian, studying material cultures, decorative traditions, and visual languages of the past. In what ways does this background continue to accompany you today? When you work, do you still find yourself looking at forms through the eyes of a scholar, or is there a point at which knowledge must be set aside in order for something else to emerge?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nermin Kura: Actually, the history of art was not my first choice for a field of study when I went to college. I always knew I wanted to make art but needed time to put together a portfolio to apply to art schools, so I thought it would be good in the mean-time to enroll in an art history program and learn about art while preparing the dossier. I ended up staying in this fabulous discipline, and it took me years before I developed a studio practice. I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to study and immerse myself in diverse artistic traditions of the world that have filled me with a deep sense of wonder, and enrichment. It is fascinating to understand works of art in light of the communities and civilizations in which they were created, to reserarch connections, whether through travel, trade, or conflict, that existed between different peoples, places, and societies, across time and space. But what has entranced me the most, in Elie Faure\u2019s words is experiencing \u201cthe spirit of the forms\u201d and how art works are conduits of the energy and intentions of their makers as well as conveyors of the soul of their times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Making art and studying it are different kinds of activities. The first is a preverbal approach where intentions are made visible through the creation of an image\/form. Here, one is physically involved with how various materials can be brought together to express specific sensations, emotions or impressions. The latter, analyzes those image\/forms within their cultural context and translates them into verbal symbols. Conscious scholarly considerations are generally absent during the making process. However, when one stands back to observe the finished work, evaluations, comparisons and art historical considerations can come in. It is an interesting conversation back and forth between preverbal and verbal modes, of what you remember and what you are trying to find out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many artists today work within a context shaped by the speed of images and their constant circulation. Ceramics, by contrast, requires slowness, waiting, repetition, and a very direct relationship with matter. What kind of freedom\u2014or resistance\u2014do you find in working within this different rhythm?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nermin Kura: Ceramics may indeed feel like a slow process when compared to faster art making possibilities available in the digital age. From the modelling of a form, to slow drying processes, successive bisque and glaze firings, it can take weeks or even months to complete a piece. In a lecture I had attended some years ago, ceramist Richard Notkin wisely noted that the time it takes to make a piece should be considered as one of the materials necessary to create it. A given ceramic sculpture might require several pounds of clay and pints of glaze for its creation as well as hours of modeling and firing before it comes into being. Even though time will be invisible in the finalized appearance of the work, it is of course an intrinsic part of its materiality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lengthy, successive stages of development in the making of clay works, are not as problematic as one might think. They have become a ritualized aspect of ceramic art, and are even more welcome in our dizzyingly rushed contemporary life. Ceramists, like other artists today are also subjected to the onslaught of thousands of images of ceramics works circulating on the world wide web as fast and furiously as those of other modes of art. There are hundreds of websites, instagram pages, youtube clips and facebook postings that share millions of images, artist profiles, interviews with ceramists, and wonderful short films, summarizing months long ceramic processes from the grinding of minerals to the making of glazes, all the way to the finalized product, in just a few minutes. In contrast to the speed of these video clips, making ceramics in real life slows you down considerably and frees you to follow the natural rhythms of your body as your hands engage with the clay. Time expands and consciousness deepens as you focus quiet, sustained attention to the possibilities and surprises of the plastic malleability of this amazing medium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A particularly intense relationship with observation seems to emerge from your work. Not a scientific or documentary form of observation, but a slow and sustained attention to what grows, transforms, and inhabits time. What role does the act of observing play in your daily practice? And what are the things to which your gaze continually returns?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nermin Kura: In my practice, observation, is a quest to understand the meaning of inspirational forms. It is also an act of attendance, and compliance to the inclinations of work that is being developed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am captivated by the shape of life. Life capsules, like eggs, shells, pods, seeds and buds in which the secret of life is hidden, are incredible to me. How does spirit become embodied in millions of different kinds of shapes? In which ways is it communicated through these forms that contain it? When do they decide to open up so we can witness the expansion of the life force in the progressive growth of the forms? What is this layered revelation, that never fully reveals the mystery of the oneness of breath that all beings share?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I continually return to observe the surreal stylizations and flowing contours of Ottoman floral motifs, milkweed pods, the immaculate silhouettes and resonant energy of Alev Ebuzziya Siesbye\u2019s bowls, egg shells, the silky surfaces and corporeal presence of Magdalena Odundo\u2019s vessels, the surreal botanics in Hieronymus Bosch\u2019s Garden of Earthly delights, magnolia seed pods, Georgia O\u2019Keefe\u2019s inner flora, rhododendron buds, the forms and atmosphere of ancient tools, the compressed energy in Michelangelo\u2019s muscular sculptures and the botanical drawings of Wendy Zomlefer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your practice seems to inhabit a temporality different from that of urgency and immediacy. Yet every work inevitably comes into being within its own historical moment. How do you position yourself in relation to the present that surrounds you? Are there aspects of contemporary life\u2014social, cultural, environmental, or political\u2014that you feel enter your work, even indirectly?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nermin Kura: My work has developed in an age that has been dubbed \u201cthe Anthropocene\u201d in the year 2000 by atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, who described it as a period dominated by humans acting as a primary geophysical force causing unprecedented devastation on the geology, atmosphere and biodiversity of the earth. My work grows in contrast, opposition and in self-defense to the destructive human forces at work in our era. My anthropomorphic botanical forms invite contemplation on the oneness of all beings. It is a meditation on our interconnectedness and on the personhood of all forms of life, animate and inanimate. My work is not born out of militancy but offers silent reflection on life and growth in a period of noise, corruption and environmental perils. Vermeer, the great master of light and silence, had also created his paintings during the horrific Anglo-Dutch Wars, and lived through the disastrous Rampjaar<\/em> (Year of Disaster) in 1672, when France invaded the Dutch Republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My work hails from the past, not a historical past but a mythical one that resides in the eternal depths of our unconscious where respect for life and coexistence lies dormant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of your works’ titles evoke ideas of listening, passage, revelation, orientation, or transformation. Your sculptures seem not simply to occupy space, but to invite a different way of perceiving it. What role do you attribute to the viewer\u2019s imagination? And what do you hope might happen in the encounter between your works and those who experience them?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nermin Kura: My work is the result of the deep sense of wonder and amazement that I am filled with when observing all the different forms of life, specifically flora, that abound in our biosphere. My vessels personify those beings as guides to our inner wisdom and a more interconnected soul consciousness. The pieces are each built as a threshold through which one can enter into one\u2019s self; a space of understanding much wider than the one we inhabit through our five senses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nermin Kura’s works emerge from that territory where memory, observation, and imagination cease to be distinguishable from one another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126094,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126079"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126127,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126079\/revisions\/126127"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1.interval.jpg\")
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