Azli Gumusgoz

Azli’s practice is an intuitive reflection of nature’s impact on her sense of being. It is reliant on intuitive processes through sporadically spilling, pouring and marbling, she intercepts chance with careful control to find emerging yet unknown forms that push and pull forward from the grounds she creates. They echo coral, caves or canyons and are driven by nature’s unseen currents that move through and around us—a contemplation of our existence in harmony with the rhythms that bind the body to the natural world. Each intuitive mark becomes evidence of human residue; a record of gesture, habit and unconscious history.

In the the absence of representation In Shifting Tides foregrounds the process as the work itself. In displaying the final piece alongside The Weight of Water (series), Azli highlights the wider considerations that went into this work - the context of surfing, intercepting chance with control, and using nature to create art.

The scale of In Shifting Tides mimics the grandeur of the natural world and it is the artist’s intention that viewers feel small in comparison to it. The work is meant to overwhelm, though not by means of intimidation, but instead in a subtle enveloping that sees to the dissolution of the self in the totality of experience. We become nature observing itself, following the currents and rhythms in the marbled lines that ebb and flow as a result of the water that shifted them.

The Weight of Water (series) photographs courtesy of Sayo Kuyumcu-Kominami (see below)