Secil (born in Istanbul, lives and works in London)
I am a visual artist, working across various disciplines with a primary focus on painting.
I graduated from the painting department at the Mimar Sinan Fine Art University with an undergraduate and Masters degrees. Over two decades, I have been exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions as well as art fairs, starting in Turkey and expanding into Europe, United States and most recently in the United Kingdom. Throughout my career, I have lectured in universities, took part in specialist conferences and symposia and participated at artist residencies. To date, I published an artist book with publisher Istanbul Graphic Museum of Arts and exhibition monographs on the occasion of my solo shows at Gallery Zilberman and Gallery Milli Reasurans, both in Istanbul.
Upon locating to London in 2017, with my daughter as a sole mother, I started to build a new set of associations, collaborations while familiarising myself with the UK art scene, while continuing to honour my existing bonds with Istanbul and the art scene in Turkey. Receiving a London Creative Network scholarship enabled me to further my studies in artist business development. Receiving the shortlist for the 253rd Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, 2021 brought me a vote of confidence in furthering my work in the UK.
I am not only involved in art production but its dissemination as a body of knowledge, thus I set up a series of artist-led sessions (Art Club) in order to support participants in tuning with their inner creativity. Furthermore, I volunteer for social responsibility projects and work with children, people with disabilities, and women in need.
On my practice
I think of myself as a dreamer who gets excited by the unknown future. For me, the idea of the future represents newness in ideas, conversations where I anchor myself with a new breath of air and sense of presence. I believe that awareness of one's own creativity and potential are guiding principles for a better and happier future for us individually and together as a whole.
In the light of this approach, I invest in the advancement of my work and my person to get better everyday, and find outlets to grow and nourish my surroundings. I believe a mindful, spiritual and energetic alignment is where my creativity and artistic ingenuity resides. Colour and texture provide the basis on which I introduce movement through metronome repetition with ideas of attaining harmony through layering and composing in conversation with light as a protagonist of the painting.
Every piece I make, represents a set of emotions, an array of ideas which denote physical, mental and energetic fields of resonance. With each work, I aim to call upon the fact that another way of thinking and seeing the world is possible. The series of paintings I produce comes with a story that relays conceptions of life and its manifestations on my concerns of care: human rights, diversity, sustainability, boundaries, and borders.
From Geometric Paintings to To Universal Fragments
My earlier works signify the strong connection and inspiration I had with geometry as a form of thinking and relaying composition. The layered and multi-coloured paintings emerged as geometrical compositions in the 2000’s. I believe, employing a grid as a format and building a painting through lines of colour helped me to bridge concepts of unity and space until recently, most significantly till 2019.
This shift coincides with the time that I have been going through a personal interrogation and exploring my relationship with reality as it were. My urge to unearth an inherent structure, a recurring motif of life charged by my questioning of notions of belonging, and personal and physical boundaries led me to try and map this inquiry onto the canvas through the use of colour and light. This mapping I started was different to my traditional gestures of building a painting: more unprecedented and more intuitive… This brought me closer to expressionist compositions. In a way I dived into the micro scale of my paintings and each grid from an earlier work informed the new painting, as if I excavated through the layers and earthed new connections.
Furthermore, divorcing in 2017 was the main reason for me to locate to London and take custody of my daughter. I believe this personal experience had a tremendous impact on my practice, leading me to focus on my sense of self, my spiritually and my connection with nature. I started to focus beyond the physically visible, tapping into my consciousness and spiritual awareness.
*Modular Infinity: interactive Installation with units
Technically oil painting has been my main medium since my studies. Alongside the large to medium and small scale oil paintings, I recently started working on the design of an interactive painting installation entitled Infinity that is composed of hundreds of small canvases that I call them units which are 5 x 5 cm and 10 x 10 cm.
Infinity, stems from lockdown exercises that I set to myself as a way of meditating on a smaller scale and as a means of creating an area of play. It has supported me in staying positive and attentive to my process of working with paint.
As an interactive installation, I encourage the audiences to engage with the work, touch the units, take them out to place them in a different part of the painting. I devised three versions for this interactive installation:
* on a 2Dimensional surface of a magnetic plate
* on a 3Dimensional surface of a cube made of magnetic plates
* on a portable 2Dimensional surface which the audiences can take home to activate
Furthermore, I am working on a print edition and most significantly on a digital version of Infinity. The digital version will be created online and will enable audiences from far flung places to be able to engage with the work and produce their own compositions.
*Colour Diaries
I keep a diary of the colours I use in my paintings, which has now become an extensive archive that I have been keeping for a decade. I exhibited my diaries as well as continued to work on mixing colours for new works.
Work history
ArtistSecil Art Studio
London, United KingdomFull Time
Skills
- Artist Development
- Art
- Art Business
- Art Drawing
- Art Department
- Art Creation
- Art Curation
- Art Teaching
- Painting
- 2D Artist
- Contemporary art
- Colour Palette
- Colour Management
- Colouring
- Colours
Education
M
M
Master Arts DegreeMimar Sinan University of Fine Arts
Istanbul, Turkey
Awards
SelectedRoyal Academy
I was selected for the253th Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, with Universal Fragments; Brightness.L
L
Artist business DevelopmentLCN London Creative Network