And now a little architecture...

First, the Old City (original site of Byzantium) from the roof terrace: the tall singular tower is, I discovered, at telecommunications tower, with the New Mosque minarets just visible left of centre in front of a distant mosque which may be Suleymaniye  Mosque. Not sure about the one on the right.

Most of the buildings on this, the north side of the Golden Horn, reflect the mid-19th c European style of architecture, as this area was designated by the Sultans for foreign dignataries, who built their consulates in the style of the day.

This one is just outside my window:

And this beautiful Art Nouveau example, with details:

Finally, another building which looks more 17th c, and an Art Nouveau door that caught my eye:

As these are all part of my industrial/commercial/wholesale neighbourhood, note the cannisters and motors on display.

And now for some kitchen art...

Filled one of the rubber feet with my special shellac mix, topped it with my peacock pigment, popped it in the oven at 50 deg C for an hour and, lo, it shrank to half the volume.

I finally dug out the still soft chunk of shellac today, and it resembles an unnatural piece of Turkish Delight.

But the pigment looked rather good on the black, so experimented with eggwhite and the other colours I'd mixed:

In a shop just beyond the pigment supplier were large bags of what I assumed to be thread waste. Julie thought it was what the plumbers used to pack and seal joints. But it looks wonderful I think.

Again, 5 TL for a half a bag, about the same size as four rolls of kitchen toweling. The threads are a mix of dull and glossy (natural cotton and poly I suppose), coiled, stretched, ragged, pulled, skeined, knotted, yet still so very clean. Perhaps from sail making? as these shops are adjacent to the chandlerys. 

Another food post...

Friday night met up with Korhan Erel, http://korhanerel.com/, another of the PPP artists, and Jesper Aabille, http://www.aabille.dk/, a Danish artist just finishing a three-month residency courtesy of the Danish Government, at Çiya, an eatery on the Asian side of Istanbul. To get there we took a ferry, about 30 min diagonally SE across the top of the Sea of Marmara and walked through one of those amazing food markets. Even at 20.00 it was buzzing and crowded, possibly more so as the weather was chucking it down with rain, the awnings dripping sheets of water off their edges.

The restaurant itself is very unpretentious, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/19/100419fa_fact_batuman. At the entry, unloading our umbrellas, we were flanked by two short counters, one cold self-service mezes (the laden plate weighed for price), and the other at which one ordered hot dishes brought by the waiters. All generally familiar but specifically unknown to me - an assortment of of soups, legumes (lentils, mushrooms, chickpeas and the Turkish broad bean), stuffed aubergines, lambs intestine sausages (may sound exotic but all Italian Barase sausages are made using this same finger-breadth casings), lamb casserole with spring garlic and who knows what else.

Upstairs at our table the waiters brought rye bread and a speciality large flat bread, the Turkish equivalent of  a tortilla or wrap. While waiting for the hot dishes we ate our mezes plates and ordered a kebap with spring mushrooms (a seasonal mushroom which grows truffle-like underground, but without the truffle's pungency). The kebap was spectacular. All dishes were shared across the table.

However, before ordering the sweet, we were given a glass of oregano tea,

followed by the tiny glasses of fresh mint, parsley, dill, apple and pear juice or chilled infusion. The dill gave a remarkable twist to the flavours. Then the sweets appeared, each dish a simple array of preserved 'fruits' in a very light sugar syrup. This one is pumpkin overlaid with a drizzle of tahini topped with crushed nuts, with green olives scattered below. The olives were remarkable, as the green olive flavour only arose, almost like a perfume, after the sweetness passed.

The other three 'fruits' were green walnuts (one below cut in half), a pistachio dough enclosing more of the clotted cream accompaniment and the peel of a particular but unknown citrus fruit. Again, the walnut was a startling taste. Despite all the fruits being presented as 'in syrup' they maintained such individuality of texture and flavour that there was no sense of 'more of the same'.Finally, yet another small drink concoction, this one hot: an infusion of spices (clove, cinnamon, nutmeg perhaps?) topped with crushed walnuts. The only slightly sweet flavour contrasted wonderfully with the bitter walnuts.

Tab for 6? 300 TL, a little over £100 total or £20 ea. Hester, eat your heart out!

Perşembe Pazarı means Thursday Market

This is also the name of a parallel hill-climbing street as well as this area. We are bounded by Banklar Caddesi (Street of Banks) to the north, Perşembe Pazarı to the west, Tersane Caddesi to the north and Yüsek Kaldırım to the east. Our street is named Banka Sokok, which means Bank Street. Caravansari's building name, a common feature here, is Tan Han, a Han most recently being known as a warehouse, or place of business but may be derived from khan/caravansari meaning inn, hostelry, road house, rest house.

Leaning out my third floor window I can just make out one of the minarets of the New Mosque, or Yeni Camii, started in 1597.

First off, the fish was delicious

Didn't bread it, just sautéed in olive oil. Shared it with Ughetta after we returned late from a PV at a rather unusual location, a posh fashion/design emporium in Sultanahmet, the area around the Ayasofya and the Blue Mosque full of tourists, hotels and shops for tourists. Not normally where art galleries are found. It seems that to attract viewers to opening, galleries must offer free wine and food. This had both.

When walking with Julie around the 'down' area of our neighbourhood Wednesday, she introduced me to several shops, including one that carries powdered paint pigments and a variety of additives: bags with chunks of pine resin, bags of glitter in every conceivable colour, bags of metallic powders the consistency of talcum (copper, gold, bronze, champagne, silver) and kg bags of Indian shellac flakes, made from the tunnels exuded by the lac bug. Naturally, this is what I had to have, along with denatured alcohol to dissolve it into a liquid.

The black object in the upper right corner is a rubber 5-sided box, presumably for fitting on the bottom of a metal leg. This shop specializes in rubber gears, grommets, rubber feet of all sizes and descriptions, and a most covetous square accordion-folded collapsible hose which I must photograph. I went back today and selected some smaller, rectangular rubber feet.

Here is the entire 100 gr bag of lac flakes dissolved in about 75ml of alcohol. The flakes should have been crushed to a powder before being melted but with some vigorous stirring and then letting it simply sit and relax, it has turned into a pourable liquid about the consistency of single cream.

Note also the two bags of powdered pigment, red and yellow, the blue and black out of shot. The shop had two pallets covered with large bags, quite heavy I imagine, of different colours, one pallet of Turkish powders and one of European powders (another photograph to get). The shop owner steered me to the European powders, saying they were better quality. He was so very nice, we chatted using Google Translate. 

What is the connection between the rubber feet and the shellac? I am using the feet as forms for casting the shellac - will take a very long time to dry out and harden. The forms will be topped with powdered pigments I mixed below:

In bags, pure red, blue and yellow; in cups, pure green, blue-green and yellow-green, red-purple, blue-purple, orange.

Shellac is quite an interesting material. Different colours (from blonde to ruby) arise depending upon which sap the lac bugs feed; when de-waxed it is edible and used to coat pharmaceuticals for slow release action, and on citrus to act as moisture barrier; finally it can be considered a natural polymer plastic as it is mouldable. 

Imported from India it almost seems as if everything available in the neighbourhood is not from Turkey. But in fact, this is the way of life here, and has been for thousands of years. The geography of this spot on Earth is unique for North/South and East/West. Trade with China (think Ghengis Khan), trade with the Vikings (they gave Russia its name), trade with the Italian city-states, everything comes here.

Artist Residency at Caravansari in Istanbul, 18 March to 31 May 2013

Arrived Monday mid-afternoon, with little experience of famed Istanbuli traffic. Julie, one of the organizers of Caravansari, met me where the taxi driver dropped me on the street corner closest to the residency building, since the street is so narrow and full of delivery and transit vans supplying the wholesale sellers of goods the taxi could not navigate to the door. This area, Perşembe Pazarı, is known for plumbing, electrical, surface finish materials, and hardware and is a bricoleur's paradise.

Looking down the street, down the hill towards the Golden Horn:

and looking up the hill towards Bankalar Caddesi, where the Ottoman bank is (not visible in the image).

The bank building has been split laterally, and the eastern half is now occupied by SALT Galata, an art space: http://saltonline.org/en/anasayfa

My first night I met the other two artists in resident, Laleh Torabi from Berlin and Ughetta Dallimonti, also from London. Ughetta is just here for a month and Laleh and I will be here for the same amount of time. The four of us ate dinner at a restaurant specializing in a regional Antakya (ancient Antioch) cooking - mezes and a very interesting meat dish.

Since the best way to get to know a new place is through food, my initial forays into vegetables included aubergine, onions, tomatoes and courgettes, the light green skinned variety - a kg of each cost around 3TL, or a little over a quid each. Package goods are much more expensive. Lunch on Tuesday therefore was a version of ratatouille with lentils:

Sat outside in the bright sunshine on the roof terrace here, from which Ayasofya/Hagia Sofya and the minarets of the Blue Mosque are visible.

I had also previously discovered a yoghurt drink called ayran, and the low-fat yoghurt here is delicious! (pink means low-fat here):

Yesterday Julie walked me around the 'up the hill' area, and today we walked around the 'down the hill' area, including the fish market, a 8 min walk:

These three fish were 10TL, about £3.6, and the seller gutted and chopped off their heads (didn't want them smelling up the rubbish). They are marinating in ayran, with chopped fresh dill and some type of fresh spring garlic. I may roll them in a little maize meal and then sautee in butter/oil tonight for dinner after we go to a PV in a new gallery space at a local department store.

The azan, or call to prayer, is broadcast several times a day - a few hours before dawn (noticed it this morning but promptly went back to sleep), midday, in the afternoon , and then again at dusk. The early morning call seems to come from a single source, but the other iterations seem to come from two different mosques, as there is a distinct delay, a muddling of the sounds and the times, a blurring of the tones. My second sonic event here, the first being the sound of running water under the sewer grills in the streets.

The Greyline Project: the line of twilight

'German Romanticism: a heightened sensitivity to the natural world...a passion for the indeterminate, the obscure, the faraway; a desire that the self be lost in nature's various infinities.'

                                                           Joseph Leo Koerner, Casper David Friedrich

Joan Edlis explores the gravitational relationship between the sun and the earth with a series of drawings, diagrams, objects and sound installations. In her new show, The Line Of Twilight, the works exude a delicate peacefulness.

Edlis is preoccupied with the fundamentals of the universe: the way the earth turns within the energy outpourings of the sun and its resulting effect on the planet; waveforms in every conceivable realization, either directly as natural phenomena or indirectly as diagrammatic interpretations of those waveforms.

The word ‘Grey Line’ is a ham radio term for a characteristic of the earth’s atmosphere combined with the planet’s tilt relative to the sun. For Britain, during just a few weeks in January, radio operators here can communicate with those in New Zealand, almost 19,000 km away. The line of twilight encircling the globe propagates radio wave differently from the rest of the atmosphere. Radio operators exploit this phenomenon, their signals travel along this line, reaching to far distances. These are all aspects that Joan investigates in this show.

Edlis explores ordinary commonplace events to do with astronomy, ham radios, solar observations, then documents her investigations and discoveries, questioning why are the summer days are so long? Why is the longest day of the year not when the sun rises earliest and sets latest? What is a neap tide, an ebb tide, a spring tide?

Simon Wilson, writing about one of her works:

‘Grey Line Half-Sphere' 2012, is made from pulped egg cartons, cotton wool, the watercolours Payne’s Gray and Cobalt Blue Hue, found scrap roofing lead, and string from a postal supplies store in Vienna. This list highlights Joan Edlis’s extraordinarily sensitive and inventive approach to materials, which places her in that materials-led tradition of three-dimensional practice which has been central to modernism since Picasso’s Cubist constructions and Brancusi’s doctrine of ‘truth to materials’. She also possesses a powerful sense of the relations of elements in space. The result here is a compelling  harmony of simple form, colour, texture and space that gives immediate satisfaction. 

But on further reflection one wonders why that tilt of the hemisphere, and then realises that the coil of lead is there to create it. And the hemisphere is just that – half the Earth - and the angle of tilt is that of the Earth in relation to the sun. Grey Line Half-Sphere thus takes its place in the series of meditations on that most fundamental fact of human existence, our relationship to the sun, that makes up this exhibition.’

 Exhibited works

Cur nà dtonn

Gaelic for ‘seafoam’ where small bits of detritus float on the sea‘s surface, sometimes trapping bubbles, and bob up and down in one place, riding the waves.

 

Daylength 51˚N 0.5˚W (London) - Solstice/Equinox/Solstice (gas jars)

Three different liquids – transparent, dusky and opaque – proportioned according to day length in London for different seasons.  The dusky layer slowly sinks into the layer of darkness over a period of days.

Colours of Dusk

Household liquids sealed with wax in all the shades of dusk.

Vermilion Tone Time

Watch crystals containing Vermilion tone gouache, positioned on a diagram of the sun’s ecliptic arc, the path the sun takes throughout the day relative to the celestial sphere. In summer the arc is very high, sweeping across the breadth of the sky, and in winter it is much shallower, appearing to rise and set across a much narrower arc.

Twilight 50˚08' 30' N 29 May 2012 (Cambridgeshire)

Twilight, measured from 20.48 to 22.20 in lux (luminosity) then plotted as a graph, defines the state of darkness over 21 aquatints, also measured in lux. Light level readings were recorded at a site in Cambridgeshire having minimal night time light pollution, as seen in the three images of the night sky with moon.

Genuine Vermilion Disc

The dry pigment Vermilion derives from sulphur and mercury (mercuric sulphide). Toxic and prone to turning black in sunlight this colour is also known as Cinnabar Vermilion, Scarlet Vermilion and Chinese Vermilion.

The Grey Line (sphere)

The equator is not simply a cultural construct but the fastest moving point on the surface of the earth. Geo-centrically the equator and the poles travel elliptically within the celestial plane; helio-centrically the poles are tilted at an angle of 23.4˚ to the ecliptic plane. Positioned to receive morning sun, the lens will focus sunlight onto the red disc throughout the duration of the exhibition, resulting in a dark record of light.

The Grey Line (half-sphere)

The earth turns within the outpourings of the sun’s radiant energy. The tangent point of the globe where sunlight just skims the surface of the earth is the band of twilight, also know as the Sunset Terminator.

Curve of Darkness 51˚N 0.5˚W (London) 19 June 2012

The Grey Line appears as an asymmetric curve on this Winkel Triple map projection, devised to reduce the distortion of landmasses towards the Polar Regions. Certain ham radio frequencies reflecting within this line of continually diminishing solar energy, using it like a path to reach distant parts of the globe. The shape of the curve constantly alters according to season.

Earth Sound Receiver

Lightning strikes generate Extra Low Frequency (ELF) sub-radio signals, which bounce within and travel along the Grey Line’s path.  A horn amplifies these frequencies into audible sound from lightning as distant as 1000 km.

Shade and Shadow (slideshow)

Shade is the result of the lack of direct light falling on a surface; shadow is the result of something blocking direct light, or interposing between a light source and a surface.

Shade assists the eye/brain to recognize and define three dimensional shape and form; shadows can do the opposite by obscuring and blurring the definition of what we perceive. Conversely, the  absence/diminution of light often helps the eye to see more clearly, stimulating only rods, which outnumber cones by 20 times (still from slide show).

Circling tide (wave) (video/four speakers)

Gravitational attraction between the Earth and Lunar masses generates the ocean or planetary bulge which drives the tides. The shingle on this particular stretch of Irish coast is oddly angled to the direction of the tide - thus the crash of waves pans dramatically.