Turkish ceramicist Leyla Borovali shapes Aegean heritage into clay

PORT ALACATI, TURKEY — Leyla Borovali’s studio, a balcony literally over the Aegean Sea, seems suspended between sky and water. The huge table, the shelves of bowls, the clumps of clay: all of it is enveloped in the immense blue, broken only by an olive tree leaning into the view. The artist, in blue too, holds ripe figs whose roundness recalls the shape of her creations.

Around her are vessels whose bodies swell and curve, their rims dipping and rising rather than obeying a circle. Some carry the imprint of textiles, translating Aegean fabrics into the harder language of stoneware. Others seem almost geological, their surfaces marked by fire, oxides and the contingencies of the kiln.

At 28, the Izmir-born artist has already traveled a long way with clay. She studied illustration and printmaking at Parsons School of Design in New York before turning to ceramics, then completed a Master of Arts in ceramics and glass at London’s Royal College of Art. In July, Architectural Digest Middle East named her among “11 Artists From Turkey You Need To Know,” citing her translation of Turkish and Mediterranean textile traditions into clay.

Colors of the earth

Her work has changed with geography. In Barcelona, newly out of art school, she gravitated toward brighter oranges and blues. Returning to Turkey altered the palette. Earth, fire and elemental tones took over. Rather than relying on chemical pigments, she became interested in the marks left by flame and in materials that carry their own history. Her family has a long connection to agriculture. “Where was I born, where do I come from, what makes me who I am?” are questions she increasingly brings into the work.

The Aegean pushed it further. Salt on the wind changes the texture of the clay, giving pieces made here a different surface from earlier ones. “Even the iodine carried by the north wind goes directly into the clay,” she told Al-Monitor. Natural light matters so much that she avoids working after dark. 

An earlier bowl made in London feels contained, urban; one produced here is looser. “When you live in the middle of the sea, in something like a cave, everything you make becomes completely organic,” she said.

Turkey’s female ceramicists

Her road into ceramics passes through the Izmir master Mehmet Tuzum Kizilcan, whose austere forms combine Bauhaus restraint with the alchemy of saggar firing. Kizilcan began working with clay in 1959, at Fureya Koral’s workshop in Istanbul. 

Though men have been present in Turkey’s ceramics sector, it has been a feminine domain: Koral, Turkey’s first modern ceramic artist, opened a studio in the mid-'50s, bringing a craft associated with mosque walls into the language of contemporary art. Another great artist, Alev Ebuzziya Siesbye, passed through this studio between 1956 and 1958, later describing it as the place where a studio first became, for her, somewhere to invent rather than reproduce. 

Jale Yilmabasar, Turkey's first woman professor of ceramics, covered public buildings with architectural panels of roosters, eyes and Hittite figures. Candeger Furtun, another pioneer, lined up rows of severed male legs, a hand resting on one thigh, and made the way men occupy public space her subject. Elif Uras, working between New York, Istanbul and Iznik, has filled the vocabulary of Ottoman ceramics with female bodies and women’s labor. 

This was a reversal: sixteenth-century Iznik tiles were made by men for spaces women could not enter, and the industry there is now largely run by women.

For a young artist, talent and references are not the same as an ecosystem. Turkey, Borovali acknowledges, is not where international art markets first look for a creative hub. Yet the country offers “an endless source of inspiration,” with traditions deep enough for young artists to build stories of their own.

The ecosystem is strengthening, she believes. Social media has widened networks once confined to smaller circles, while galleries, fairs and independent initiatives offer new points of entry. “You can create something very original here,” she says. “Perhaps you simply have to make a little more effort to be seen, yet social media changed a lot.”

An inheritance of aesthetics

Borovali grew up in a family where aesthetics seeped into ordinary life. Her great-grandmother, though unable to read or write, painted beautifully. Her grandparents collected carpets; her father began buying paintings as a teenager. Her grandmother approached the setting of a table as a composition.

The best-known artist in the family is her aunt, Feleksan Onar, an entrepreneur who turned to glass in her late 30s. “Perched,” a flock of 41 mold-blown glass swallows with clipped wings made in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, was shown at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum from June 2018 to April 2019; seven birds entered its permanent collection.

Turkish art history knows this kind of family: Koral's own, the Shakir Pasa line, produced painters, writers and scandal enough to sustain a prime-time series a century later. Borovali’s family produced the same instinct for beauty and none of the mythology.

She jokes that, although she belongs to a family that thrived on art and aesthetics, she is its “first artist with a diploma.”

The inheritance is not only a matter of biography, she says. It is also a legacy of women. For now her work is less declaratively political than that of older counterparts such as Uras and Furtun. Her own descriptions emphasize the personal stories carried in the motifs of passion and of resilience.

In early November, Borovali will open her first solo exhibition at Offgrid Art Project in Istanbul, after a collaboration with Offgrid founder Ipek Eyuboglu and Otmas Uras' founder Eda Uras that began around CI Bloom in April. She describes it less as a gallery arrangement than a friendship among women who want to “lift each other up.”

Before that comes a project connected to Cappadocia, Turkey, and its signature plant, cehri, a thorny Anatolian dye plant also known as Rhamnus petiolaris, whose berries have long produced the yellows of carpets and kilims. She is developing a vessel inspired by the plant, to be paired with a cehri-scented candle, along with six others drawn from the region. The plant cannot supply the pigment: its color burns away at kiln temperatures. She is trying to find the yellow again in clay.

It is an appropriately Borovali problem: how to take something inherited, fragile and rooted in the landscape, and give it another form.