Creative Cave

a little cave story and some creative news

Caves were an ancestral choice for our artistic pursuits, providing much-needed safety, solitude, stillness, isolation, surface, depth, and darkness for creativity to emerge and come alive.

Tens of thousands of years ago, sapiens and some other extinct human species like Neanderthals ventured deep into caves with moving torch fires and shape-shifting shadows, bringing all kinds of imaginations to life. There, humans found shelter and also a secret chamber of creativity. With the pigments and the fingers of their planet they marked the walls with bison, horses, deers, mammoths, lions, human silhouettes, handprints, lines, circles, and dots. They covered the walls of the caves with shapes and stories.

I wonder how long it took them, once they discovered the cave, to start leaving marks and drawing on its walls. How did they feel when they touched the surface with their hands and colours? When it comes to the caves and cave art, wonder and awe are abundant feelings. So are thrill and fear. Many bones and skeletons also hide in the caves.

It has been twelve years that I have lived and worked in my ancestral home that I call my creative cave. My cave is the place I spent most time in because this is where I live, sleep, dream, draw, work and create. The cave is my secret chamber of creativity.

From now on, I would like to share some news, stories, happenings from the cave. Between you, me, and the cave. Grab your torches, take out your shoes, mind your heads; we are entering the cave…

A Little Cave Story

I live in the historical peninsula of Istanbul. My home is on the skirts of one of the seven hills of the city. Above us, there is the Cerrahpaşa Mosque (built in 1593), known for the fig tree it once cut down and Bulgur Palas (built in 1912), an infamous mansion that had been hardly ever used and closed for decades. Bulgur Palas was recently restored and opened as a library and cultural center for public use. If you ever come to Istanbul and visit Bulgur Palas, you will be very near my cave. So much so, you can actually see our building from Bulgur.

Our four-floor building was built in the late 1980s, when I was about six years old. We can say the building is a bit younger than me in its current form but it is much older also. Because before it was an apartment building, it was a wooden house where my mother’s large family lived with the grandparents, two sons, two daughter-in-laws, and six grandchildren. My mom was one of the four granddaughters.

The wooden house was a home to my mother’s family, who move to Istanbul from Thessaloniki¹ after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

After the wooden house was converted into an apartment building, three more families moved in and my grandparents began living in this one-bedroom apartment. And it became a second home to me as we visited often. I spent my weekends here during adolescence, and after the first year of university, my mother and I moved in with my grandparents. After my mother’s death, my grandparents left the place and the city, and I left the country.

The place remained abandoned, filled with two household’s furnitures and belongings for years until I ran out of visa, money and energy to stay in the cradle of capitalism². I returned to Istanbul with my cat companion and began living here in January 2012. Upon my return, the house was in ruins. It needed to be repaired, cared for and lived in. And I was exhausted. I needed somewhere to rest, reflect, understand, heal, and give my newfound creativity some time. We seemed like a good match. We needed each other, though I probably needed the house more.

At the beginning, I discarded and gave away so many things because there was literally no space to walk. Decluttering continued over time and became a part of our story. Then I had the floors and windows replaced. I painted the walls and the doors. I did what I could with what I had and transformed the house into what it is today. This house, and the decade spent within it, partially transformed me into who I am today.

In 2013, a year after moving in from another continent, when I was having trouble adjusting here and writing my stories, drawing unexpectedly entered my life and I began to draw. It came out of nowhere but both my mother and my maternal grandfather were good with their hands, perhaps ancestral home was not the only thing I was assigned to keep, there was also this ancestral skill that was surfacing. All the things I have been doing ended up being mostly indoors, I lacked money to go out and I did not enjoy the city life; so year by year, I’ve become more of a cavewoman.

Sometime around 2018, I started to call this place my (creative) cave and I began to express my growing desire to leave and live in nature. 2019 was the year of my father’s accident. In 2020, pandemic broke and I got further locked. I said to myself it seems like fortune wants me here, trapped and creating. In 2021, I made my first cave drawings on the walls. I also refer them as “wall tattoos.” In a way, they were my offerings to the house to set me free. As I type this, I’m looking at one named “Little Boxes.” You can see two thirds of it, one third of it is behind the couch and it is my biggest work to date.

There is a new kind of relationship we are having with the house and this article is one of its first fruits perhaps. Our place in the world matters and it sculpts our matter. I am quite stirred to be sharing our stories and news with you in this written manner.