Ceramic artist Nurdan Yilmaz Arslan’s latter day works are exhibited in Akeramos Art Center in Bursa under the title “The Rest”. Known for her awareness to social matters, this exhibition of Arslan was also proving her artistic approach as well.
Assoc. Prof. NURDAN YILMAZ ARSLAN
When we view the story and the technological evolution of ceramics from the neolithic age to industrial revolution and from there to the present time, the creative expressive language of the “clay” has not been changed in artistic terms. Ceramic art have always got involved in the cultural life identity of all societies since the humanity existed and it continues its’ existence. Earth, water, air and fire are the elements from nature and which forms the ceramic… It gives you a chance to create a plastic expression language which can turn into form and aesthetics by coming together with the spirit, the body and the mind.
From utensils ceramics to architecture, from tile art to ceramic sculpture, it's a material in bones of our life to the extent of all areas of use where ceramics technology and design evolve together from past to present.
Second half of the 21st century made it possible for the modern art concept to be formed over plastic arts. As a result of positive sciences, analytic thinking system, industrial evolution and ever-developing technology which built up the modern world, “education” and “social sciences” have gained a significant pace. Especially the modern ceramic art which concerns our field, have shown a manner in parallel to all the developments of the era and reasserts the well-rooted traditional culture it lives on with an individual creative process.
As a plastic material, “ceramic” have taken shape again with the contemporary methods of all production and thinking customs and become the material of the artistic production. And ceramic being abstracted from the material and transforming to a different artistic language, has taken form during this process which constitutes the fundamentals of modern ceramic art and academic art education. My conceptual works beginning with the Bosnian Wars in 1995, have come to a whole new dimension with this plastic expression language of ceramics. I’m re-constructing the pain points of violence against women in our country, wars in the world in recent years and immigration by setting them over child’s game and stories.
I can expound my ceramic and porcelain works where my technical, aesthetical and intellectual interpretations come to life with earth, as the political expression language of being original. In our era where communication is shaping our life in full flood, we became societies and individuals who cannot communicate. Maybe we artists are trying to make a sense of this life to be freed from this chaos.
