After moving from Istanbul to the small village of Turunç in southwest Turkey’s Muğla region, I finally had the time and energy to explore creative projects. Being an artist, this was a dream come true. My days were now spent drawing and wandering around my new hood. Within walking distance, there is the ancient settlement of Amos Antik Kenti (ancient city). My first experience there woke something in my bones. This place felt familiar. It felt like home. Driven by curiosity and my desire to build upon this connection, I began exploring this ancient site on a regular basis.
Amos possesses an aura of mystery since it has yet to be properly excavated and its past inhabitants, the Carians are just as mysterious. Very little has been documented about this tribe aside from them being seafaring people some believed to be pirates. I wanted to find out what the Carians did here. Were they practicing rituals and what did they involve? Was this place open to everyone or a just a selected few? Why did they choose to bury their dead here, what was the significance? Something was pulling me in, a strong, magnetic energy that I couldn’t ignore. I wanted to create something here, to activate the space with a new human energy, to connect to its history by engaging with the space and to establish a relationship with this ancient paragon. Having anytime access to explore this over 2,200-years-old historical site, why not create an artist residency? So, I did because I could. Carian Project is a self-initiated artist residency meaning I have no one to answer to but myself. There are no rules or restrictions. There are no fees or stress wondering whether or not my “proposal” will be accepted. I have the freedom to design my own program giving myself the span of one year to allow time to fully investigate this ancient site and create site-specific work that resonates with this cultural-historical landscape.
Carian Project focuses on exploring dichotomies that are present in Amos: life and death, growth and decay, past and present, etc. Creating ephemeral art pieces that resonate across time and space from my experiences wandering around the site. Acting on energy, I am drawn to a specific location and my reaction to how I feel comes through a tactile expression, a sculptural catharsis that echoes this rhythmic space.
Carian Project: Practice
Through observations (of natural environment, seasonal changes) and an intuitive research practice I refer to as “feel” studies: being present and in tune with my feelings at a specific location or vestige, having a sensory awareness that deepens my ancestral connection to “feel” energies expressed through textures of nature, stone and past presence. Ideas are generated and developed using an experimental approach working with a variety of mediums such as photography, video and clay. Through ritual gestures of awareness: making sculptural objects from clay, arranging and rearranging found fragments from ruined structures to tell stories and recording spontaneous actions of nature, I engage with Amos. One aspect of this project is a series of totems created from clay found at a nearby source. These sculptural objects I have deemed “Scopes”, were and are created at various locations throughout Amos that blend with the landscape and resonate a primitive quality abstracted by the human hand. Once built, these “scopes” are then abandoned, left vulnerable to the exposure of sun, wind, rain, animal and man to be shaped, transformed and ultimately returned back into the earth. They’re birth, transformation, deterioration and death are documented to preserve their memory yet the objects themselves are transient. The spontaneous creation of these “scopes” adds another layer of history to this place connecting antiquity with art making in the modern sense.
Spending time studying the shapes of things, vestiges, forms and fragments how they change depending on the time of day, season, the angle of the sun, shadow, weather. I have found dusk to be the best time to really see things clearly. Amos is a place of perpetual discoveries. Eleven months later and I’m still making new discoveries, seeing things for the first time that have always been there but were hidden by bush or shadow during a particular season. Listening to the sounds that flow through the space. Wind rustling the leaves of trees, birds swooping low and turtles wandering through the grass. Breathing in the smells of old soil, sea and sage. Touching the broken, textured sides of vestiges and wondering what it once belonged to, who carved this stone and how did they feel why they were creating this form? Finding columns lodged between trees in an obscure hiding place or suspended, frozen mid-roll in an awkward location far from all the others. Experiencing the ever transforming face of Amos shift and move, age and disappear in an endless dance with ephemerality.
With Carian Project, I hope to generate curiosity about Amos Antik Kenti emphasizing its cultural and historical importance before it completely dissolves and disappears. Perhaps this project will encourage other artists to create their own residency in historical, cultural and unconventional places.
My questions about Amos and the ancient Carians remain to be answered. I will continue to wonder, explore, experience and feel study my way around this ancient site at least knowing I have found “home”.
To learn more about Carian Project, you can visit the following links:
http://margapatterson.tumblr.com/
https://www.instagram.com/carianproject/
Images courtesy of the author.
