‘Mother Nature’ on display at exhibition in Ankara

Hatice Utkan Özden – ANKARA

Painter Burçin Erdi’s works are on display at Ankara’s Cer Modern until Jan 20. The artist depicts how the lives of human beings are destined to end as it starts.

Burçin Erdi makes her paintings to show us we all belong to the same common ground: Mother Nature. Her current exhibition at Ankara’s Cer Modern, titled “Mother Nature,” is proof of Erdi’s point of view. For the artist, her paintings are questioning the reality of our lives in modern times and how we try to exist amid all the chaos in the world, although we are all part of this colossal existence called nature.

The paintings of Erdi combine many things. However, among them the most significant ones may be the faces and the meanings behind them. ‘‘Several years ago I started a new series, and I drew athletes and their gestures as they reached the finish line. The expression on their faces was a mixture of pain and sadness. These people were running for success, and despite fulfilling their dreams, they still have an expression of sorrow and pain. I was fascinated by that.’’

After this period, when Erdi became a mother, her feelings towards motherhood and having a child began to reflect onto her drawings. Giving life to someone and thinking about this process have fascinated her. What she saw is the resemblance between pain, death and the birth of a human being.

“That’s how I started to paint the dogs in my paintings. They are not symbolic or try to symbolize any violence. On the contrary, they are the meaning of life for me.”

Erdi tries different techniques and discovers new styles. She divides her works into parts and paints at different times. That’s because she loves to paint large-scale paintings. Each detail is shown on canvases. “I have created a different technique while doing Mother Nature paintings. I made the paintings part by part. First I painted a part of it, then another part. Finally, I combined them,” she said. Doing this, Erdi also discovered new things and this idea of discovery aligned with her main thought about the paintings.

“I want people to see the resemblance of the expression of success, fulfillment, and pain. The expression is the same. We can say the same thing for the dogs. On the other hand, full of violence,” said Erdi. However, this violence is also in their nature. These are not the paintings of violence but rather how our view drives our behaviors and us.

That’s why the thought of motherhood and birth fit the works of Erdi. According to the artist, an athlete or a dog does not matter; they are always running after their ambitions and the result as they fulfill their dreams and goals is the same.

Human reality and its nature

However, what is significant about her works is the urge to see the reality of nature. Erdi uses a black pencil to draw her forests and depict the truths in her nature paintings. However, just in one painting, we see she used a red pencil at the center of the large scaled painting to paint a womb.

“A womb is the beginning of everything for a human,” she said, “and it’s full of blood,” meaning it is always living like a breathing person. Since her motherhood started, Erdi thought about the process a lot, and she is one of the many people to have divided her life into two, for her son. Her divided life also inspired her to create these paintings.

On the other hand, her way of using material also changes and differentiates from her earlier paintings. “I realized that the materials I used transformed. Each material changed during my creation of these paintings. As the materials changed, the paintings changed, and I realized being a human is an ever-changing process that never stops.” Among the gallery walls of Cer Modern, the painting with a red uterus in its middle stands like a sculpture rather than a painting. The realities of humans come from the violence and nurturing of each other.