Şahmaran I is the moment of transformation itself. Rising from the base, the serpent body traces a spiral, creates its own void and closes around it. At the two ends of the form two beings face each other: on one side a plain, instinctive serpent head; on the other a face turning human, with horn-like protrusions, a forked tongue and an inward gaze.
The two heads never touch. The distance between them is the space of the ancient distance between human and nature, of longing and of silence. The textured, scorched skin of the fired clay lifts this narrative out of a fairy-tale figure and carries it into the memory of the earth.
Şahmaran is a series of ceramic sculptures born from the traces of an ancient narrative that has lived for centuries in Anatolia’s oral culture and is associated with wisdom, nature, healing, secrecy and transformation.
In this series Şahmaran is not treated as a direct representation of the half-human, half-serpent form of the traditional tales. The human face, the serpentine body and organic forms cease to be separate parts joined together and become a single being that coils, divides, reunites and constantly transforms. Şahmaran is thus reinterpreted less as a particular figure than as a mode of existence living on the border between human and nature.
The recurring spiral movements, inner voids and facing human and serpent forms in the sculptures make the concepts of threshold, transformation, duality, inner wisdom and longing visible. The void is not merely a formal element of the sculpture; it becomes a symbolic space evoking the passage between the world above and the world below, the known and the unknown, the human and nature.
Each piece in the series carries another state of Şahmaran. Sometimes human and serpent turn into one another in the same body, sometimes the figure coils into itself; at other times the distance between the human face and the natural body creates a feeling of silence and longing. Across these different forms, Şahmaran’s wisdom is conceived not as knowledge acquired from outside but as an ancient memory hidden within earth, water and living things.
Rather than retelling the tale, the Şahmaran Sculpture Series follows the traces it has left in memory; it approaches Şahmaran not as a mythological character from the past but as a symbolic being of the relationship between nature, the human and memory that continues to transform today.