A grown-up tale

We all have our stories to tell. We have our joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and lots of interim shades and timeworn nuances. Some keep their personal undercurrents well under wraps, while others wear their heart on their sleeve. Aslı Saglam leans towards the latter ilk. Considering she is a pretty active artist, the tendency to express her emotions and convey her life story comes in pretty useful. That much will be clear when the public gets a glimpse of her some of her more recent work, a series of hand-printed linocuts titled “La Vita Preziosa” (The Precious Life), which is due to run at the Jerusalem Theater until December 21, under the curatorship of Noga Arad-Ayalon. Linocut is not exactly the most facile of materials through which to get your ideas and feelings across. So, I wondered, is Saglam looking for a hard life, almost at all costs? “That's not hard,” counters the Turkish artist, who has been based in Jerusalem for the past couple of years. Her husband is a doctor at Hadassah University Medical Center in Ein Karem. “I do bronze by hand,” she declares. “I don't think that's crazy. I just don't use any tools.” Actually, she does use a tool, albeit a basic one, but one that harks back to a long bygone era. “I used a wooden spoon. I use medieval techniques. Working with lino and wood are similar. It's the same technique.” By now, it had become clear that the smiley ginger- haired character sitting on the other side of the Jerusalem café table was one tough cookie. For her, art appears to be about spinning out a yarn, a personal tale, and she certainly has one to relate. “The series transmits dreamy, ironic, playful feelings, but also feelings of reflection and contemplation,” Saglam notes. “The aim of my technique is to reflect the sentimentality of my theme. My approach to printing art is to avoid mechanical process/ elements, as I prefer to go through the whole process of creation manually. Each work is printed as a limited edition and, as the essential and the crucial product of my manual dexterity, is truly unique.” Any work of art should have some kind of storyline behind it. With La Vita Preziosa that is the definitive core. The whole spread was conceived with a book format in mind. All the works are rectangular, in keeping with a page shape, and there appears to be a fairy-tale substratum to the whole thing. “Everything, our whole life, comes out of our childhood,” suggests Saglam. “I actually created the series with all my childhood memories, therefore each image has a story. This is why I kept the rectangular format as well, so that the series can be exhibited as a gigantic one-piece children's book and/or in a traditional format.” Following her Jerusalem Theater showing, Saglam is planning on taking the display a step further, in a physical, dimension-oriented sense too. “I am planning to do some really huge prints – maybe wood prints – and I am planning to use the same theme. I want to use very big pieces, to become one installation, a print installation.” We are talking big here. “I think they will be three, maybe four, meters high. I like working hard,” she adds with a laugh. Saglam gives the impression that she embraces life wholeheartedly. Once she is into something she tends to go the whole hog. She studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, in Florence, Italy, and completed a degree in sculpture in 2007. She also graduated summa cum laude from the master's degree program, in Visual Arts and Multimedia Techniques, in 2009. As if that weren't enough, she says she chose Italy to gain her formal arts education because she had one eye on developing a career as an opera singer. After finishing her MA, she'd planned on relocating to Tokyo to study performance art. But it wasn't to be. “My mother had a very serious illness for 10 years,” she explains. “I am an only child. I lost my father and we don't have any relatives, so there was just the two of us – my mother and me.” Saglam's mother was also an artist, and Saglam began airing the fruits of her nascent talent very early on. “I started exhibiting, with my mother, from the age of five,” she says, “so I have always been used to that.” She duly returned to Turkey, to care for her mother, and taught art at a local university for four years. During that time she juggled her daytime job with taking care of her dying mother's physical, emotional and everyday needs, and struggled with the constraints of institutionalized education. Saglam takes a serious approach to her artistic output and to life. She comes across as an ebullient character, bubbling with creativity and willing to give her all in order to push her artistic and, hence, personal envelope just that little bit further. She tends to give her all to the job in hand, which is why, after studying opera singing for four years, she opted for the plastic arts. “If you want to sing opera you have to live it,” she notes. “You have to breathe, sleep and eat for your singing 24/7. I couldn't do that. It would be too demanding for me. I needed to do other things, too.” She also felt that the works of Verdi, Puccini et al. did not allow her to go the full personal emotional Monty. “Opera, as a stable art form created in the past, did not feel like the natural expression of the fluidity of life that I was searching for,” she states. The intensity of Saglam's work ethos is evident in “La Vita Preziosa.” She clearly knows how to judiciously opt for one line or another, mixing intricately crafted sections with more expansive areas that allow both her and the spectator an emotional and physical breather. Interestingly, for the current series of works she opted for seemingly bland base shades, of gray. “I love the texture of the work. Color is less important than texture, for me,” she explains. She feels that, by offering us less in the way of color, she will get us to bring our own input, and imagination, to the spectator experience. Saglam may be a perfectionist, but she is also streetwise. That is something she tried to get her students to take on board, the demands of the Establishment notwithstanding. With her unbridled take on the learning continuum, she encouraged her university charges to get out there and connect with real life. “If a student didn't feel like drawing one day I'd tell them to, maybe, go to a few exhibitions, and to come and tell me about them, the next day. Art is also about PR, and about connections, taking a different point of view and about feeding from the city.” The personal narrative is, of course, a basic element of creation and, following her mother's death, Saglam was able to channel her grief and develop her powers of expression by digging into the past and bringing some powerful childhood memories and experiences to the visual and tactile fore. “'La Vita Preziosa' depicts an intimate and timeless period of my existence: childhood, which I carry into, and merge with, the present,” she says. ”We carry our childhood into our adult life. It is a part of who we are.” Then again, we look back on our early years from the standpoint of years of life, love and all the quotidian, prosaic, down-and-dirty baggage we accumulate en route. Saglam is not trying to revert to the blissful innocence of her infancy. “I reformulate my work with the feeling of a fairy tale but also an ironic disenchantment with the grown-up aesthetic. The series transmits dreamy, ironic, playful feelings, but also feelings of reflection and contemplation. These emotions belong to the unpredictable fairy world of dreams but also to human existence and its lullabies in daily life. The work evokes those rare and illuminated moments, revealed through that melding of the imaginary with the day-to-day that is real, concrete life.” For more information: www.jerusalem-theatre.co.il/

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