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Respect To The Glass

A cornerstone in the art of glass making

With "Cam Atolyesi", Erkin Saygı has put into being a new creative achievement of his more-than-35-year-life in the world of glassware. With this project, he keeps alive the heritage of the historical Beykoz glass making art in the old centre of Turkish glass making in Istanbul, Beykoz, and opens a new page in a very different area of the art of modern glass making. Those who look at his items find themselves in the halls of museums where the most extinguishing samples are exhibited.

By various glass making techniques, the most prestigious items of glassware had been formed during the history. In the dept of history, ancient kings, emperors, princes and princesses had always supported the competition of technique and creativity in the area of glassmaking to keep the hand cut glassware in their hands in particular...

Erkin Saygı keeps track of this tradition of prestige alive with his special products which all reflect contemporary interpretations. He forces the limits of the competition of creativity.

Here, the glassware produced in thick and basic forms are shaped with an incredible patience and with a meticulous work of as long as a week sometimes. Probably, even the glassware itself is astonished by the efforts that form itself. A piece of glass, which can be produced just in a few minutes, is cut, rectified, textured and polished on its every side during a week sometimes, and is given its final shape in the end. It must never be forgotten that those who work in the area of glass making always look at their watches, but here they look at calenders... Here, cutting a glass means reshaping a very noble material with a never ending creativity. Moreover, all those cuttings are only designed in the “emptiness of transparency”, and shaped by “the rotating stone”. Because each of these glass items is created one by one... Each of them is a unique sentence and a unique poem...

Take these precious items produced in "Cam Atolyesi" into your hands and carefully look at them. In their weight, you will feel the greatness of the thousands of years’ accumulation of designing tradition of the Anatolian glass makers. If you look at them closely, you will see the texture and tracks of the items made by the ancient Roman glass makers... If you touch the deep cut decorations, you will feel as if you are touching the oldest and most prestigeous pages of European glass making heritage... Yet, if you take these thick and weighty glass items close to your ears, you will hear the sounds of contemporary art work.

Prof. Dr. Onder Kucukerman
Mimar Sinan University The Head, Industrial Design Department

Respect To The Glass

To create an art work, it is necessary to have a heart, brain, experiences, consciousness, determination and spirit as well as to combine the human perceptions consisting of his unbrakable passions, accumulation of knowledge, surroundings, history, traditions and customs. With all these combined elements, an artist takes any material and starts to knead it, struggle with it, unite with it and form it to create new, good and beautiful things. This material is words for a poet; paint, brush and canvas for a painter. For a sculpturer, it is clay, plaster, marble, bronze, stone, wood or copper...

As a sculpturer who use every kinds of material, I personally would like to cordially confess that the only material I dare not to use is glass. It is the material that I cannot even touch and dare not try to use despite the fact that I am very eager to use. It is very different from ceramics and very similar to it as well. Both the items made from ceramics or glass are the ones whose inner sides’ emptiness can easily be seen from outside, and no matter how much artistic and aesthetic care they are produced with, they also must have functional obligations. The facts that they can only be produced in certain thicknesses and that they are fragile make an artist to set a relation between glass and ceramics. As in the case Alev Ebuziya’s ceramics and Erkin Saygi’s glass objects...

We know the glass is formed by blowing freely or into a metal mould when it is still hot and also it is decorated and embroidered by various cutting techniques after it has coold. But the method here is quite different. The specially produced thick and elipsoid glass globe is carved and cut by conserving its quality in every stage, and by partly polishing and partly making dull just like a sculpturer forming the stone, marble and granite.

In the old Turkish language, this was called “conserving the munificence of the material”. Here, too, it is obviously seen that the original and respectful features and qualities of the material are taken into consideration. To name them is not an easy task; although they look like pots, bowls, vases, etc. in which liquid or dry, uncooked or cooked substances can be put, they have no intention to carry the functions the above mentioned items do. They never want to be named with those names. They are like the respectful, dignified and honest generals who have gained great victories. You cannot approach them very close. You are eager to touch and caress them, yet their nobility reserves you from doing so. You can only look at them with great admiration and envy for hours.

Prof. Tamer Basoglu