Boarders (2010) Abracadabra -1st Mardin Biennale Festival in Turkey.
Boarders was originally created in 2002 during my BA in Fine Art, specialising in Painting and Printmaking. From a distance it reads as a repeating pattern — intricate, almost decorative, with a quality of movement and rotation that makes it appear to spin. The eye is drawn in before it understands what it is looking at.
Get closer and the pattern resolves into barbed wire.
That gap between the first impression and the second is where the work lives. The same visual logic that makes a pretty pattern also makes a boundary marker, a deterrent, a material designed to lacerate. Beauty and threat occupying exactly the same geometry. The illusion of movement — the spinning, the optical restlessness of the repeated form — makes the image feel alive in a way that keeps you looking even once you know what you're seeing.
I'm interested in the idea of trespass: the barbed wire as a line drawn by someone with the authority to exclude, and the aesthetic impulse as something that crosses that line without permission, finding pattern and movement in a material whose whole purpose is to stop you.
The work was first exhibited at the first Mardin Biennale in Turkey in 2010, shown as part of the international Abracadabra exhibition, and again as part of a street art project in 2012.
Boarders (2010) Mardin Biennale, Turkey.
