Studio Visit
Eylem Aladogan, Artist
07.16.10 — By Monica Khemsurov

When Dutch artist Eylem Aladogan took her first trip out West in 2006 — three months of driving alone through the Nevada, Utah, and Arizona desert — there was plenty to be afraid of: the wide-openness of the landscape, the sensation of smallness and isolation, the possibility that the only hotel for miles around would be fully booked for the night. “These feelings of restriction at the same time you’re constantly going, driving forward, really inspired me,” says the 34-year-old, who’s based in Amsterdam. “There’s so much energy when you feel that every day.” Enough, it would turn out, to fuel her art for the next four years, as she worked out a way to visually harness those opposing forces of anxiety and empowerment. Incorporating layer upon layer of desert-inspired mediums like ceramics, leather, feathers, and raw wool felt spun by the designer Claudy Jongstra, Aladogan’s sculptures and installations evoke the tension of reaching for something or bracing for flight, turning moments of spiritual and psychological conflict into grand gestures of dark, offbeat beauty. Birds, rifles, daggers, Native American culture, and Moorish architectural patterns are all recurring motifs.

The road trip may have inspired Aladogan’s recent visual vocabulary, but overcoming fear and following instinct were themes she dealt with long before it — starting, perhaps, with her decision to leave behind the relative security promised by her undergraduate graphic design studies to pursue a master’s in fine art, obsessed as she was with the tangible exploration of materials. For her thesis project in 1999, she hand-sculpted in wet, unfired clay a series of seven large birds which lay like beached whales on a table, desperately soaking up moisture from a cloud of mist overhead. “If you gave them too much water, they’d melt, but not enough and they’d crack,” she explains. “For me it was about holding onto something you can’t let go of. You don’t believe in the reality, you believe in what you think is the truth.” When the exhibition ended, there was no choice but to throw the dessicated creatures away, but not before they’d earned Aladogan her wings — Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans van Beuningen put her in a survey of fear-focused art that also featured work by Bruce Nauman and Louise Bourgeois, and Amsterdam’s influential emerging-art gallery Fons Welters also came calling. The unexpectedly quick success derailed her plans to do further aesthetic studies in biology, handing her the motivation to set up her own studio and launch herself into her work.

That’s where we found her last October, surrounded by the earliest inklings of new pieces for the biggest solo show of her career, which opens at Fons Welters in the spring of 2011. To prepare, Aladogan will spend the next nine months pushing her desert inspirations even further, embarking on a succession of residencies in Antwerp, China, and ultimately Los Angeles. “It all starts with travel for me,” she says. “I like to be disconnected; I need the tension of being really far away from home and not feeling safe at all in order to create. You’re closer to your instincts that way.” In Antwerp, she’ll work with her litho and offset printers to prepare the exhibition’s centerpiece: a 3-foot-long box containing an oversize book of drawings and wrapped in a woven textile depicting one of her previous works. In Xiamen, China, she’ll focus on ceramic objects and sculptures. And in L.A. she’ll have the chance to revisit the open roads that started it all. In anticipation of that show, which promises to be a breakthrough for this up-and-coming artist, Sight Unseen wanted to offer a glimpse into her process. Further reading can be done in 1:1:1: Eylem Aladogan, the first in a series of mini art monographs produced and designed by Niessen & de Vries.

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The downstairs half of Aladogan’s Amsterdam studio, one of many live-work spaces that Dutch artists and creatives can rent by adding their name to a citywide waiting list. In this building — which also houses the studio of the graphics duo Niessen & de Vries — Aladogan is part of a small board that votes on any incoming tenants. “Most of the time I don’t work here,” she admits. “I make models and drawings, but I do anything bigger in workshops.” The masking tape on the floor was for a 1:1 paper model she made to test the scale of a recent sculpture.

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Most of the making happens in the back of the room, where inspiration photos, graphic references, sketches, tests, and models illustrate the process and trajectory of Aladogan’s work in the last five years. On the table in the foreground are two of the pieces she plans to include in the box she’s preparing for her Fons Welters solo show next year. Like most of her drawings, they layer several techniques: litho, offset, and screenprinting, plus etching. The one in back was also manipulated with Photoshop; you can see its digital progression on the splash page of Aladogan’s new website.

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One of the most ambitious works inspired by Aladogan’s Western roadtrip — photos of which hang on the wall at right — is "Before Departure (all my changes were there)," a 100-foot-long installation resembling a giant crossbow stretched to its limit. This was one of the first sketches for that piece. It resembles a bow viewed from above, but filled with shapes Aladogan says are an abstract cross between feathers, knives, and the sharp, wind-eroded landscape of Utah and Nevada. At the top, she traced the back of an eagle’s beak she’d modeled in epoxy. “It’s where all the forms converge, like at the end of the highway.”

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"Before Departure," 2008. “With a crossbow, the most energy is right there before you shoot,” she says. “I wanted to make a sculpturework that controls this energy, or better yet, attempts to control this energy.” Aladogan herself sculpted in clay the sharp forms seen in the drawing, but the 300 spear-like elements that make up the beak at the back of the installation —inspired by the tesselated geometries of Moorish architecture — had to be cast by the 100-year-old Dutch ceramics company Koninklijke Tichelaar. The wool ropes were made by the sheep-keeping designer Claudy Jongstra.

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A group of broken or flawed iterations of the ceramic beak-spears lay on a table in the studio, alongside strips of leather that Aladogan burned drawings of a highway into with a hot metal tool.

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A more recent iteration of the Before Departure sketch forms part of a technique study for Aladogan’s textile box, which will be the centerpiece of her Fons Welters show. It’s a mixture of tusche-ink and litho-pencil; because her drawings are so intricate, she does a great deal of them on lithography stones, which allow her to print multiples. The wing-like shapes on the right incorporate Moorish patterns taken from photos of Spanish mosques like the one at left, others of which can be seen all around the studio. “Their mathematical forms evoke a spiritual feeling, and the way they point upwards visualizes the idea of going in a certain direction, or moving towards the sky.”

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The same mosque photo at right, which Aladogan cut out and pierced with the form of dagger to create the image at left. “There’s an abstract feeling that you’re crossing through something,” she explains. “It’s all about the movement that exists when you confront your fears. In doing that, it’s unavoidable to feel tension, but it’s the only way to achieve change in your life. Otherwise you stand still. It doesn’t have to be big fears like spiders, it can also be a phone call, or anything you face in daily life.”

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More inspirational photos, among them two pages taken from a book of portraits of Native Americans wearing traditional masks. The culture as a whole inspires Aladogan in the way its members approach raw materials, but the masks are of particular interest because they represent both fear and strength in a single gesture.

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A table containing mainly models and tests. For the fabric swatch at left, Aladogan made a large drawing of a falcon feather on paper, then scanned it and had it printed onto a thin silk. The dark cutout second to the right was created by Photoshopping mosque patterns into a wing-like image, which will form the basis for one of the textile-box drawings. And the cardboard construction to the right of it is a model for a 2008 sculpture called Mettle Rite, whose thin spires take the form of blade halves.

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The bird and feather forms that recur in Aladogan’s work predate the desert trip; she’s always had a fascination with nature, to the point that she almost studied biology after art school as a way to deepen her artistic research into the subject. Her clay-bird thesis — the sole surviving pieces of which are pictured above — was followed in 2002 with an installation called Dendogram Room, depicting crumpled ceramic sheep seemingly on life support.

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“Fortitude Solitude,” a drawing completed for Aladogan’s 2009 show at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, also depicts a bird-like figure.

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At left on the table, the hairy swatches are from her early work with Claudy Jongstra on the felt ropes of “Before Departure.” The pair worked together intensively to select the final form they would take, with Aladogan experimenting on all different kinds of wools; the beard-like piece on the left is a combination of raw sheep’s wool and feathers, and the creamy bit on the right is treated felt. In the middle is a sample of the woven textile that will eventually wrap around the art-box she’s creating for Fons Welters. It’s being made at the nearby Textile Museum Tilburg, a favorite resource of Dutch designers that offers research and production facilities for creating experimental fabrics.

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In the center, another model for “Mettle Rite,” and behind it, a Photoshop-modified image of Utah’s Bryce Canyon.

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“Mettle Rite,” a 24-foot-high sculpture installed in a park in Arnhem as part of 2008’s Sonsbeek International Sculpture Exhibition. It’s probably Aladogan’s most overt reference to mosques and cathedrals, with its corresponding upward trajectory symbolizing striving, courage, and the surrounding psychic tensions.

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The male figure at the bottom of this picture is by the legendary graphic artist Frank Miller, one of Aladogan's inspirations. The pink drawing represents one of the most fascinating aspects of her painstaking working process — the way she transforms her own visual references across mediums, creating fodder for new pieces. To make it, she photographed one of the models for “Mettle Rite,” Photoshopped the image, and traced it onto tracing paper. She then used it for “Backbone Spearhead" ...

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... the piece shown here. In it, the pink tracing has become an abstract mask for the man's torso below, with Bryce Canyon in the background. The mask typology, of course, is inspired by the Native American headwear in previous images.

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The upstairs part of Aladogan’s studio, used more for drawing and daily activities like bookkeeping. On the right is a large mood board of sorts, which she created many years ago and now uses more as decoration. Many of the photos represent materials she was interested in, like textile or copper. The drawing on the table in the foreground is the beginning of a commission for the permanent collection of the Dutch history museum Teylers, the oldest museum in Holland. It’s since been completed.

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A close-up of the mood board reveals two more of Aladogan’s biggest inspirations: Frank Lloyd Wright and William Blake, both of whom focus on ways of using light and whose work prompted her to take the desert trip in the first place. The decorative books at left are old bibles. “There was an exhibition here about how they were made, using embroidery, jewelry, stitching, and leather. It influenced my own decision to make a book.”

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A leather-wrapped knife made of translucent selenite, which Aladogan found in a Native American crafts store in Arizona. “At the store they told me this particular tribe uses it in a ritual to remove the negative energy from your aura, to symbolically cut it out,” she says. “I keep it in my studio always for good luck and as a reminder of my trip.”

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Aladogan’s elaborately titled 2009 piece “Listen to your soul, my blood is singing iron triggers that could be released,” where the quills of feathers become shotguns. “It’s about listening to your instincts, and exploring all the possibilities you have but may not be aware of. That’s why I called it ‘iron triggers that could be released’ — it takes a lot of internal struggle to listen to your heart.”