HABITAT: BLOOM BY MELIS BUYRUK

 

Turkish-born artist Melis Buyruk's (b.1984) large-scale floral ceramic sculptures depart from contained, definite pottery forms and celebrate the traditionally feminized discipline. After graduating from the Ceramic Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Selçuk University in 2007, she began exhibiting across Turkey. However, her latest exhibition Habitat: Bloom is in New York's Leila Heller Gallery.

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The exhibition showcases seventeen porcelain works by Buyruk, where a ceramic topography of intricate flora and fauna are encased in wooden boxes and granted their own habitat. In a mastery of porcelain, the traditionally feminized and overlooked art form associated with domestic life is reinterpreted as a medium that points to bio-futurist tensions.

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Marking Buyruk's first exhibition in New York, Habitat: Bloom presents the first viewing of the Turkish artist's large-scale works. Leila Heller Gallery's New York exhibition space allows for a deeper immersion into Buyruk's intricate and delicate porcelain world, the larger works create a more commanding visual confrontation with Buyruk's hybrid flower forms.

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Buyruk identifies and subtly blends vegetation patterns and the natural world, creating porcelain flower fields. They are disorienting, as they evoke both artificiality and illusion in a play on logic. While strikingly realistic and incredibly meticulous, the porcelain flowers are unfeasibly monochrome, hybrid, and eerily level, suggesting an alien environment. Lit up, and enclosed in a box, the work is further imbued with notions of the fantastical. Fluctuating between boundaries of reality and surreality, the show reminds the viewer of our fractured and disjointed relationship with nature, and provokes a double consciousness.

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Drawn to the poetic fragility of porcelain, and the physical engagement it required, Buyruk became a specialist in the craft at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Selcuk University. Buyruk's reintroduction of the material in the contemporary context, recognizing and manipulating its ability to uncannily mimic organic forms, saw the artist be exhibited across Turkey

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