Alya Yersu Toraman

Collection

Image: As a Turkish multidisciplinary artist, Alya Yersu’s work explores the potential of often discarded materials through Turkish and Islamic geometric motifs and decorative patterns. Transforming antique silks, polyester linings, studio scraps, and homemade bioplastics into sculpture, her methods reflect on repair, hand-stitching, and intuitive construction, blurring the line between garment and object. Each piece and their artistic value is equally shared amongst opposing ways of experiencing or interacting with the work; as “art” while flat or “garment” when draped or worn. Two-dimensional or three dimensional, object or clothing, their importance is not rooted in the presence of a wearer. However, when a body comes into contact with the work, the objects allow for a specific autonomy within the user, separate and closed off from any pre-existing framework of wearable expectations. The potential of cloth and substance is eternal, continuously recyclable. Gifted to her, ephemeral, decaying antiques inspired Alya to encapsulate and freeze the material, actively preserving the artifacts to exist in entirely new contexts; their lining seam-ripped to expose the process-evident pattern pieces, their remnants felted on Turkish cotton to use flatness as an advantage for multi-use lifespan, and their scraps combined with biomaterials to create visual binders (hat, bag, ties, and buttons) to add physical and contextual depth to the overall flatness of the work. As all materials yearn for a higher appreciation, we must recognize and listen.

Image: all lookbook images shot by Elinor Kry @elinorkry

Bio

While witnessing constant overproduction in any and all industry, Alya Yersu Toraman makes work about being highly critical within every stage of the making process, de-alienating the user from production and ultimately remarrying people to the material itself. She creates wearable objects to exist beyond the digital frame of documentation, forming a unique system of distribution, interaction and ownership that allows the material to dictate the artist’s intuition-based construction and the wearer’s intuitive, multi-faceted modes of interaction. From dry-rotted antiques to homemade bioplastics, the work becomes an artifact, encased and suspended in time to allow for a material defrosting or self-deconstructing through which the work takes on a new, improvised form as it interacts with a body.

alyatoraman@gmail.com

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