Maya Balcioglu Recent Drawings and Fabric Works

About

Statement for Lungley Gallery
I started working with fabric during the first lockdown. I am not sure what exactly triggered this other than a general sense of no progress, as if continuously rereading the same page, I was looking for an intermediary form, a go-between, a sense of potential in the long stretched present. I had been working with mylar, cutting film strips, painting, but this was a mechanical application of ideas about time and motion, in essence no different to painting or drawing.
  
At the same time, I was witnessing people arriving in dinghies on the beach in front of our house, seeing them coated with blankets, surrounded by border police, ambulances, rescue workers, a different level opens up.
The power of what I was seeing in these huddled images are present, combined with the power of thought they traffic in the gaps of the mind. So the fabric works are studies of introspection, methods of stripping finite analysis, through the agency of anachronic atmospheres in which time stands still. In these works objects are expressions, brutal at times and irrational. They are deconstructions; taking things apart, expressing reversal and internal workings. Stitching is about focus on the object, it is slow, intentional and limitless. It is also a tool to reject certainty.
Drawings speak for themselves. It’s my primary tool, it is as essential as the self and the ego. It is vital and intimate in every sense. It grounds and reflects knowledge. And yet what it identifies cannot be reduced to acquired knowledge through sensory organs. It is a dance of reflective experience and an affirmation of life.
Gogol said that the function of the image is to express life itself, not ideas or arguments about life.
I would add that image is a momentary illumination with a flicker of truth.
Maya Balcioglu Dungeness, July 2021
Maya Balcioglu (b.1955, Instanbul, Turkey) lives & works in London and Dungeness. She graduated from Brighton in 1982 and the Slade School of Fine Art in 1984.

The first institutional exhibition by artist Maya Balcioglu, consisting of large scale works on paper, latex and fabric completed over a 15-year period is open at The Mac Belfast and continues till 8th August. Images of the exhibition and works on show can be viewed on the gallery website http://lungleygallery.com/maya-balcioglu/