Surface
Our guest this month is a student of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. She also participated in various competitions by designing different carpets. So, she has won the first prize two consecutive years in different carpet design competition held in Turkey. Such a young and successful talent Gümüşten is making designs to make different and special efforts in watercolor, oil painting, sand sculptures. We, Decor Magazine, asked her about the days he started to design and her plans for the future.
Firstly, let’s know Gülbahar Gümüşten
I’m senior student at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Department of Traditional Turkish Arts, Carpet and Rug and Old Turkish Fabrics. I have won national and international awards in many competitions from elementary school to university life. I can briefly describe myself as a young designer representing her institution and country and doing her domestic and international carpet designs under her own name.
Where did the design come into your life from?
Design is to think and plan for me; It is a set of steps before an idea is reached. In short, it is to think. Maybe eating, sleeping, and travelling. In this sense, design has entered my life since I started to draw my ideas, that is, in elementary school. But it took me a while to get close to production. I started to get the pleasure of touching my carpet designs during my university years. I continue to experience the process of weaving and touching.
What does Carpet mean to you? What is the difference of carpet from other design products?
The carpet alone is a different thing for me. I feel much better when I design a hand rug. I know there will be one of it and it will smell wool when you touch it. You will feel that naturalness by looking, seeing and smelling. For me, these two types of design and art are separated. I have different feelings for the machine made carpet. Finally, a design that I touched, referred me to very different ideas than handmade carpets that I cannot express in words. At the same time, the machine made carpet is functional as well as decorative. In this sense, the carpet has a very different place for me both in itself and in other design products.
You won the first place in carpet design competitions organized by IHİB in 2018 and GAHİB in 2019. Do you want to talk about the carpets and stories that you designed in these competitions?
I attended the IHİB’s HARE program. I was very impressed by the movements of the ropes in the cauldron while watching the master’s rope painting there. Dozens of ropes that sometimes follow each other in the spinning boiler and sometimes wander under the water and make us feel its existence… Some were dancing with foam on the surface, some on the bottom… Some of the finishes were uniform and some abrage… It was that time to design “Surface”. Surface; It is the carpet I wove by inspiring from the movements of the ropes that lost on the bottom and soared at another end of the water, which wanted to climb on top of each other and make themselves feel.
“Infinity” started to emerge when I went to Domotex fair in Germany. It is a work that emerges from my sketches while I’m visiting Hanover city hall. It means the endless emptiness of the crowd that we find ourselves in. At any glance, I would describe it as another unusual city, made with the excitement of discovering an unfinished continent.
Is there an artist or designer you’ve taken as an example?
There are things that I believe are good in the field and I can take a sample of anyone who does not contradict himself. These people may be my teachers and sometimes artists. For example, I like Carol Sebert abroad. They design workshops from different materials by conducting workshops under the name of art days. I am very interested in these works and artists.
Where do you want to see yourself in 10 years?
I dream of myself as a designer who founded a design studio; not as an illustrator who constantly molds in a studio and pushes the limits of programs. I want to be an individual who travels, sees, researches and makes it a part of her life. I’m trying to feed from different areas and places right now. I attend different workshops. I also follow exhibitions in different fields. I make tiles, watercolors, oil paintings, sand sculptures. I want to do this with a team after 10 years. I’m talking about a team that doesn’t lack the brush paper pen oil paint. Why shouldn’t creative artists come out of us today? Or why wouldn’t a Turkish design office also set up its own workshop to meet the demands? And as a designer, why not show up with those carpets abroad? It will take time, but I believe it will.
