For The Ones Who See by Heart

Oil and Hobnails on Wood

The born blind girl came into the studio by checking the walls with her free hand (the other one was holding her mother’s skirt) and asked with a hardly hearable voice: “ Could you please tell me about red?” I stood still where I was, at the end of my tether. While I was desperately thinking about a respond to her; I whispered “ Oh..my little Angel…”

When I had one more sip from my cooling tea, I turned back into the reality of the studio. At the moment one of the old works has drawn my eye. It was an oil painting, some Turkish Words written on it. With subsequent works in years to give an old appearance to this writing, I have made up/created an alphabet. Then, I used it on wood in a different work with the same content and named it as “Declaration.” .

For this second version (A private collection) my comments were:
“The purpose of the work is to address human’s unhealthy and alienated relationship with nature and himself/herself. It is aimed to symbolise unknowns with the square in the centre; emotions with the circle; analytic wisdom with triangle and intuition with the blue at the bottom.
Note: Script and the alphabet are originally belonged to the artist.”

This would help me for the third version of the work but this time the alphabet would be “Braille”. I have made a couple quick esquisses for the design of the woods and since the life itself is circle/horizontal, I decided to use the circling one.

After completion of draft design, I returned to my daydream to give a response to the Little Girl with a question..
“Can you read?” Her mother took the word this time: “ She is in the third grade.” And continued with some mixed feelings; “Yes, she can”. I hold the hand of the little girl by making closer to the ‘ For the Ones who See by Heart’ and put her small fingers to the first hobnails. While she was strolling over the hobnails on wood, I felt that I could see an indistinct smile come onto her face…