Today we’d like to introduce you to Beliz Iristay.
Beliz, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I grew up as a little girl in a most secular city in Izmir, Türkiye, on the Aegean Sea. My father always wished to be an artist therefore my childhood passed by painting with him during the weekend days with colorful pastels. His own family never let him to become an artist, so he was always encouraging me to be one. After his sudden death, as a teenager, I decided to follow up on his dream and enrolled in an art education at Izmir Dokuz Eylul Fine Arts University. I received my BFA in 2003 and studied traditional Turkish Arts and specialized in Turkish-Ottoman ceramic techniques & miniature painting. After my graduation, I moved to Istanbul and started to work in “Glass Furnace,” an international Glass School. Having lived in the cosmopolitan city of Istanbul, where Asia and Europe meet, I used to going back and forth from East to West. I grew up in a country that, although surrounded by checkpoints that function as mental borders, has no actual physical walls. When I moved to San Diego in 2004, I realized that I transfer my East-West mental border to a North-South mental border, and I decided to discover the Mexican culture from firsthand while living in San Diego and started to go back and forth to Guadalupe Valley, Ensenada until I moved permanently and build my ceramic studio on 2010.
In 2010, I participated in the Biennal De Estantardes in Tijuana, Mexico. In 2015 I got nominated for San Diego Art Prize. Following the prize, I made a glass installation piece for Balboa Park Centennial at San Diego Art Institute, and the same piece got selected for the El Paso Museum of Art Border Biennal, and her installation piece won first prize at the biennial.
The prize fallowed by my first solo museum show called OKU/READ in 2017 with in El Paso Museum of Art in Texas.
Mexican Adobe brick series brought me three individual prizes, including the National Ceramic Biennal of Mexico and the 4th National Ceramic Biennal of California in Brea, CA, in the years between 2015 to 2017. In 2018, with “Precious,” I received a Jury’s choice prize in UNICOM, International Ceramic Biennal in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Since 2018 I have been showing at international art fairs such as SOFA Chicago, Miami Red Dot Art Fair Miami, Los Angeles Art Fair.
I won of San Diego Art Prize 2021 and exhibiting my work in museum and galleries.
I’d like to share my ceramic knowledge by teaching ceramic techniques in my studio TURKMEX in Guadalupe Valley in Ensenada-Mexico. She hosts spring & summer workshops, does artist residencies, private commissions and public art commissions. She continues to explore new ways to develop her art in different forms. She now lives as a “border artist” between in Baja California, Mexico and in San Diego, California with her family.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The biggest challenge for an artist is to make a living while still maintaining as much artistic freedom as it is possible. Life is hard for everybody, and I do not have any other specific challenges that are different than other artists.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
As an immigrant artist, I feel compelled to use art as a sort of translator between the very different cultures that I live in. I have always been interested in how cultures tie together; you can see this in my work, were I expose relationships between lands and cultures. The “immigrant” aspect of my own identity drives my choice of materials and techniques and pushes me to explore a wide range of distorted politics and traditions in my work.
My artwork examines the co-relationships of cultural heritages of the countries that I live in… My designs also reflect my current life as a Turkish-American artist working on both sides of the United States- Mexico border. As such, my work is a representation of the identity created in the in-between spaces. I am very blended in the way I live, so I can mirror that into my work. You can see the blend, like how clay & soil blends into each other.
I repurpose traditional practices of ceramics and paintings, using them to investigate contemporary issues in environmental politics, gender, and cultural tensions. I enjoy mixing contradictory materials to showcase the cultural transitions that I am grounded in. Soil-porcelain jars series uses traditional Turkish and Mexican techniques with harvested clay & soil mixture from Guadalupe Valley, Mexico, with Ebay purchased half-cut traditional Chinese Porcelain Ginger Jars that are hand-painted with traditional Turkish miniature style with underglaze ceramic paints with ceramic decals from China. In these series, the work itself identifies the transformation of traditional ceramic art into a contemporary art object.
To me, in a process of making an artwork, I believe that you can improve of a mastery of skills and techniques, communication of unique vision, professional approaches to process, and presentation that are the ingredients for an aesthetic excellence.
The aesthetic excellence allows for imperfections and mistakes embrace the improvement of the techniques & the materials which would make my art unique and would bring more qualities into it.
Aesthetic excellence calls for “perfect imperfection” in a process where mistakes can become discoveries that bring uniqueness to the work. I am rooted in making process, but it is important to weave the strong concept in the making bcs it develops a strong conceptual idea that deepens an aesthetic excellence. I believe that I have strived in my work to aesthetic imperfection by embracing the process.
My Brick sculptures utilize traditional Mexican Adobe bricks along with Turkish miniature-style glazing. The bricks represent metaphor of immigrants’ baggage and the walls that they have to go through. The soil that I carve from my own land in Mexico to create the adobe bricks is combined with American-made contemporary ceramic paints. The designs that I use to decorate my work are reflecting my background as a European-Middle Eastern in border region. Therefore, I mostly apply the classical Blue-White underglazed painting style as a surface decoration in my sculptures.
Linguistic games are also point to the relationship and dialogue between diverse texts, redefining the work as a system of codes, avoiding the specific socio-historical context. I would like to use calligraphy and words in my installation pieces and sculptures like Boobphora series: is also a combination of words: breast and amphorae, the silhouette of an amphorae mixed with fragments of female figures: breasts, lips, torsos. Isolated and incomplete physical elements that do not correspond, that provoke. Breasts taken from silicon molds made by cast impression directly from the bodies of many women, different women of all shapes and sizes. The experience of a woman exposed, open, vulnerable, that point to the references of her work.
As a Middle Eastern woman & a mother who makes her living from art, I do believe that I accomplished to be a role model for other immigrant women in United States. I want my work to become a voice of all (non)secular Middle Eastern countries.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
At the moment, I am working on a public art commission for the San Diego City Public Arts Commission. I’m elaborating a monumental outdoor sculpture for a local park, here I intend to invite the local residents to be part of the design phase dialog. I am creating a 16′ high monumental outdoor sculpture for a brand-new park in Otay Mesa Region. This will be the biggest commission I ever had in my career, and I’d like to continue of creating public art projects in the future for different parts of the country. I find that exhibiting my artwork in private galleries gives me the freedom to create without boundaries, but at the same time, I really enjoy reaching the broader viewer with public art commissions where I can include the community as part of the creative process. Through my art practice, in interviews and lectures, I have contributed to the cultural discourse of the region. I do public artist talks, exhibition walk-throughs, and studio presentations in collaboration with the institutes and museums that I work with.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.beliziristay.com
- Instagram: Beliz Iristay
Image Credits
Enrique Botello
Zeynep Dogu
