Lungley Gallery: Maya Balcioglu, “Katabasis Journey to the Underworld”
A new show by Lungley Gallery, Katabasis: Journey to the Underworld is an incredible play of texture, color, and materiality by resident artist Maya Balcioglu (b. 1955).
With works ranging from stitched and woven fabrics to stained papyrus and embroidered buffalo skin drums, the seeping ink and luminous textiles of this collection transform the sun-lit second floor gallery into an ethereal shrine to a lost oracle.
Maya Balcioglu, “Head”, 2022, ink and papyrus. Features a face emerging, ghostlike, from the ink pooled on parchment.
Standing over 60 years of age, artist Maya Balcioglu is incredibly well read, and the notion of text and dialogue plays a key role across her work, proclaiming “these scraps of cloth want to be read”. Her titles call back to this theme of text — “Oracle”, “Document”, “Night Letter”, “Lyric”, “Chorus”, “Song” — inviting the viewer to read the stories woven into the fabric of her art.
This love of text and reading is central to the design of this exhibition in particular, joined by a selected text written by Lucy C.M. M. Jackson, classics historian at Durham University, written in response with Balcioglu’s work. A thread connecting this diverse selection of pieces, Jackson’s text “Katabasis“ touches on the notions of materiality and fate alluded to in the titles of these 2022 and 2023 works.
Fate and inevitability bridge the Greek mythos inspired text and Balcioglu’s process. Scribed by Jackson, “the journey begins with a step. A foot. A stitch. A drop of dye […]” connecting both body and material under the trappings of fate. Linkage of the materiality of Bacioglu’s works with the body is not only found in Jackson’s text, a number of her works feature titles and characteristics inspired by the body, such as: “Head”, “Tongue”, and “Torso”.
Maya Balcioglu, “Torso”, 2023, Fabric, latex, paper, acrylic paint.
In Balcioglu’s process, she relinquishes control to the nature of the material through a number of techniques such as burning, tearing, and ink bleeding. The creation of her works mirror the fateful journey’s in Jackson’s text: “the drop of dye makes its way in fits and starts. It lengthens, stretches. It leaves a trail” in a manner far from Balcioglu’s control, up to the forces of nature.
Not a passive participant in her works’ creation, however, as according to Gallery Director Mark Lungley, Balcioglu likens her process to “cutting open the skin; once you’ve made a stroke it cannot be undone”. Following instinct, her works are spurred by bold and decisive motions free from hesitation — Balcioglu operating almost as an oracle, defining the starting point for the unintervenable ‘journeys’ made by her materials upon parchment.
These bold brushstrokes, spreading burn patters, and bleeding dye indeed follow their fate, uncontrollable by Maya after their onset. The works exist not without her initiation and interventions, leaving traces of the artist in her work much like the characters in myths trying to avoid their fate.
Stitching, slicing, weaving, binding, staining, burning, and detailing, Maya Balicoglu has made a beautiful story of fate and one’s futile meddling into it.
Katabasis Journey to the Underworld is on display at Lungley Gallery (London, W1W 7LG) from May 25th until July 8th, 2023.