emptiness inside

Zehra Şonya wishes to carry the emptiness inside her to the eternal emptiness/eternity or to destroy herself in emptiness. She tries to give meaning to nature and time by feeling with her intuition and understanding by her mind, while having contractions through the process. Besides the effort of categorization as an upshot of observation, examination, and anaylsis; this endeavour mixes up directly with nature and makes itself visible by the shapes that are consequences of the material joy of the act of work-craft. This is how she discovers her inner core. The controversy she lives, may be outside of time and place, at the ‘moment’ where everything silences, is her essence, her desire of sculpture that she thinks it would become evident in emptiness. She expresses herself through the shapes of thought, of a geography of nature, she had chosen from the beginning.
When she sees her individual being as a part of a whole; against the egocentric attitude of the Western Thought, which places humans to the centre of the universe, and then questions and tries to destroy this with its criticism; she tries to keep herself outside of the boundaries of hierarchic structuring and reasoning. From this point of view, at this exhibition with the concept of ‘time-place-vagrancy’, Şonya contextualizes herself through timelessness and placelessness.
In a way, Şonya, attaches importance to the passage from place to timelessness. Falling outside of time and place, freeing herself by getting beyond causality, transformation of time to the reality of ‘moment’, being hanged at ‘moment’ and the denial of time comprise her main problematique.
Şonya’s relationship especially with stone, her act of becoming one with it, her work style’s timelessness is her way of settling up with herself. In her work, circular shapes, pointed images within circles represent ‘moment’, present time, afterlessness, the intersection of time and timelessness. Textures on the surface are the material marks of what is at constant change belonging to the earth. On the other hand, the Mevlevians turning and falling on to ‘moment’, termination of time, fire’s call of personality into being by dragging it to destruction, circle’s pointing to emptiness after signalling towards universe’s entity and being are the hints making her work meaningful. Her sculptures, designs can also be related to a place making up her internal reality; an emptiness or silence. Her ‘Lotus Flowers’ existing in light within darkness or which light themselves in darkness, or her other dark-ground designs equate to the effort of reaching the emptiness where time and place cease to exist and the being spreads freely. Şonya’s escape from inside-outside, symmetry and hierarchy, blurriness of her work’s boundaries, her desire to dominate place and time by spreading and multiplying over place, drag her to give meaning to the non-existence of time and place, silence and eternity, finding one’s self, living the moment of being herself, emptiness…

4th ODTU Fine Arts Festival Catalogue,
2002, Ankara, Turkey