Finger and Food and Flowers
Derya Akay

My practice is driven by a curiosity of how things are made. From flowers to food to furniture, it explores the means of production of non-art objects and how these processes find confluence with my own art making. My research is always a process of education where I learn the skills necessary to make the objects that interest me. The acquisition of these skills begins to inform my art making. Ways of building, growing and cooking become translated in my work into gesture, composition and form. In this way, the production of non-art objects becomes the work itself. These works include textiles, still life, ceramics, photographs, furniture and gardens. My ceramics reflect my interest in the meaning and experience of a meal that I have grown, cooked and served to the community that surrounds me. In this manner, I engage with questions of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, community, cultivation and process. To look at this from another perspective, I am interested in the intersections, parallels and tangents between life, art and work.