The transformation of artistic practice often occurs gradually, through subtle shifts and unexpected encounters. For Ekin Balcıoğlu, this evolution spans continents and mediums, beginning in Izmir, Turkey, and leading to a unique ceramics practice in Taos.
The roots of Balcıoğlu's artistic sensibility trace back to her upbringing among Turkey's archaeological treasures.
"Because I am from that soil, I grew up with the ancient ruins and seeing those sculptures and goddesses and gods," she explains.
This immersion in classical forms led her to pursue multiple degrees from the California College of the Arts, as well as Central Saint Martins of the University of the Arts London.
A little more than a decade ago, Balcıoğlu arrived in San Francisco as a 23-year-old artist focused on creating watercolors based on mythology, folklore and ancient civilizations. Today, she creates intricate ceramic narratives through sgraffito, an ancient technique requiring artists to carve through surface layers of clay to reveal contrasting colors beneath. The exacting process embodies the unforgiving nature of her earlier watercolor medium—both require precise execution, with each mark permanently altering the work's surface.
"You can’t make any mistakes,” Balcıoğlu explains. “There is no room for changing it."
The pandemic brought unexpected artistic possibilities when Balcıoğlu relocated to Taos and began working at the Taos Ceramics Center. There, she met master potter Max Massey, whose expertise complemented her innovative surface treatments. Their collaboration began with a straightforward proposition from Balcıoğlu: "I said, why don’t you give a big pot of yours to me, and then I'll carve it?"
That partnership has pushed both artists to explore new territories.
“We experiment a lot,” Balcıoğlu tells SFR. “Both of us enjoy doing that, experimenting with different forms. Since he's a production potter, he would do the same form over and over again for months, versus what we do now which is to try many different things. That’s been so much fun for both of us.”
Rather than planning out her carved narratives, Balcıoğlu embraces spontaneity.
"I don't plan anything before I start," she reveals. "It comes out very much like an improvisation. And, it depends on how I'm feeling that day. Sometimes it's calm and sometimes it's fiery."
In their new group show, The Mortal Coil, Balcıoğlu and Masey's vessels establish an intriguing counterpoint with Em Kettner's precisely measured 2x2 inch ceramic tile vignettes.
"The tiles are my sketchbook, if each page turned to stone," Kettner notes. "I use them to imagine origin stories or future narratives for my sculptures, and they often touch on the pressures of having a body that is always on display, always under study."
The diminutive scale of Kettner's work demands intimate engagement.
"The illustrations tend to incorporate erotic or mischievous behavior, so the scale is a nod to peep show voyeurism," she adds. "A visitor has to lean in close to see the salacious scenes, as if through a keyhole in a locked door."
Much like Balcıoğlu and Masey's works, Kettner's sequential storytelling also draws from historical precedents.
"I love medieval narrative paintings, tapestries and decorated Greek vessels where the main character pops up multiple times on the same surface to enact different moments in their story,” she says. “These objects provide a kind of proto-animation—the action unfolds sequentially and suggests the passage of time via a static medium."
The Mortal Coil ingeniously highlights these divergent approaches to handmade ceramic storytelling.
"We're each telling stories 'in the round' but one is convex and the other concave,” Kettner says. “I like imagining how a visitor might have to shift their perspective and change positions as they explore the gallery: A dimensional vessel compels you to move around it, up close, to receive the whole story, meanwhile flat works hung sequentially on the wall invite a larger orbit."
Serendipitously during the show’s development, one of Kettner's narrative sequences even inadvertently captured Balcıoğlu's own artistic process.
"When she sent me her story it was super funny to me,” Balcıoğlu recalls. “I laughed so hard, because that potter she was showing, and who was being watched from a very voyeuristic perspective, was me!”
Courtesy Form 7 Concept
This unplanned synchronicity echoes the exhibition's investigation of visibility, creation and transformation.
"Viewers might notice shared qualities and diverging paths,” Kettner muses, “and be able to put together other, more complex stories that neither Ekin nor I could predict when working in our separate studios a thousand miles apart.”
Like accidentally catching someone's eye across a crowded room, the unexpected intimacy in The Mortal Coil bridges distances between artist studios and personal histories. Through a hands-on approach to storytelling, the act of looking can be as important as the objects themselves, and this might just remind us that permanence can be playful, mistakes can be meaningful and sometimes the most honest conversations happen through objects that ask us to shift our perspective, both literally and figuratively.
