The Grand Finale on 30th May 2023 at the KOZO Studio in Ortaköy/Nicosia…..
By Heidi Trautmann….
I want to pay my respect and admiration to Fatma Özok who – as she has announced some months ago – has now presented her finalized graduation work to the public. Fatma is a most prolific and hard-working woman and artist. Art is her language, it is a personal need for her to do art, to experiment and explore deeply, to find the absolute meaning in her field of work which is ceramic art and which, by the way, is the very first creative expression of humanity.
I have seen the first phase of her graduation work some time ago and was excited to be witness of the Finale which took place yesterday 30th May at the KOZO STUDIO in Ortaköy, a new modern, aesthetic, creative venue, the proper frame for Fatma Özok’s exhibition.
Many art lovers and artists, students of her ceramic art school and friends had come for the opening. The exhibition hall was kept in semi dark and the individual objects were well and expertly illuminated which created an interesting atmosphere.
Review:
Some friends and I met with Fatma Özok to see the first phase of her graduation project and discussed her train of thoughts that led her to this, her vision of the Beginning of Life.
Her presentation spoke to my innermost thoughts: ‘When Mother Earth was a very young woman, she wanted to have children, and in her womb, the sea, formed the protozoa, our first ancestor..’
Fatma Özok had seen the image of an object of the sea, a giant shell, and she took this and made a drawing from it with all its windings, and from these windings, sort of ‘negative shapes’ in the graphic language, she created the first forms of life in clay, the protozoa, the first children of Mother Earth. Fatma Özok had gone back to the very beginning of Life, to the womb of Mother Earth.
I have had similar thoughts for the introduction of my poetry book ‘Garden of Life’ ….. “One day in the distant past the primeval soup started bubbling and the protozoa, our first ancestor, emerged, stretched its limbs still not developed, smelled the sweetness of land air, and decided, it would start populating the place which it has done to the present day so diligently. And with it came the ancestors of spiders and cats, of elephants and mice, of trees and roses, and all lived on mere air and love, sometimes on each other and they grew and developed under the mighty sun.”
And here they are, our ancestors, the ancestors of all living forms. Fatma Özok will continue her tale of the Earth with phase II within the course of this year and will then present it to the public.
It is a very important environmental project to make us aware of where we come from and where we are now, mistreating and abusing our mother, and if we don’t change, she will be regretting that she once gave life to us.
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