Our houses - our private spaces - turned into the centres of the universe under the long months of Coronavirus lockdown. As we all know, things can get incredibly claustrophobic when you spend too much time in a confined space. But that same space where we have lived in loneliness or that we have shared with our families or flatmates, could maybe inspire us personal and artistic projects revolving around the themes of memory, time and space. Among the contemporary artists who have explored these theme through an architecturally domestic perspective there is Füsun Onur.
Born in 1938 in Istanbul where she lives and works, Onur has played a key role in the development of modern Turkish art, introducing the avant-garde into the country's artistic landscape in the '70s. Among Onur's most mesmerising pieces there are her maquettes that recreate scenes from her childhood.
"The Dollhouse" (1970s) for example consists in a miniature doll's house, recreated in its finest details. On the outside you can admire the delicate stucco elements over the door and windows that are also characterised by stained glass motifs. The see-through ceiling is a way for Onur to invite viewers in the house, allowing them to peer inside and see handmade furniture and rugs, the kitchen table arranged with plates, cutlery and crockery.
But the clear ceiling has also got a metaphorical meaning, it is indeed a way for the artist to share her private and domestic sphere, but also her memories, from the happy ones to the saddest, like the loss of her father when she was twelve. Besides, though everything has been perfectly recreated, the final structure proves fragile, a quality that mirrors the fragility of the human condition, while the house becomes also a nostalgic ode to the transitory qualities of childhood.
Memory is also the main subject of another miniature piece by Onur, "Musical Chair" (1976), that features a bright red chair that looks as if it were falling, but suddenly was frozen in time and space. The chair turns slowly thanks to a music box mechanism that reveals a painted figure underneath the chair through small, square windows, almost a ghost-like presence.
Onur has lived and worked in the same house in Istanbul that overlooks the waters of the Bosphorus where she was born, so incorporating in her artworks childhood memories and objects (clothes, toys, furniture, photographs) as well as found objects collected from its vicinity comes as something natural to her. We could maybe take inspiration from her practice and do the same, collecting objects that have been dear to us in these terrible pandemic, in this year of loss, fear and anxiety, to tell our personal stories of lives suddenly suspended in times and space.
Comments