Defne Beyce

Screenprint, dirt and clear base on paper

Screenprint, graphite, charcoal, and clear base on paper

I’m new here. The plants know what this place has to say. They narrate for me, because I don’t know.  “Bramble” is a series of silk-screen collages made from plants, weeds that I have collected from the alley next to my studio. The plants are directly exposed onto my screens, and I print using graphite and charcoal powder. 

They are the voice, I am the medium. The objects create the language of this place and through printing I tease out their stories. In this process, I relinquish control. I learn to work within the process, but never own it. What of these stories are real and what am I imagining? Perhaps these prints are trying to tell me the real is all imagined.

Screenprint, dirt and clear base on paper

Nigella Damascena - Love in the mist, devil in the bush

Nigella Sativa - Black cumin

Nigella Damascena and Nigella Sativa, twin cousins in the buttercup family- bloom every spring with pale blue or white star flowers surrounded by a haze of ferny leaves. In the heat of summer, the flowers transform into distinctive maroon striped seed pods that eventually crack open, spilling their shiny black seeds.

Both have traveled for millennia in north Africa, western Asia, and southern Europe. Seeds from n. Sativa were found in a Hittite flask in Turkey from the second millennium BC. Seeds from n. Damascena were brought to America by colonialists in the 1600s.

These black, shiny seeds are familiar. I remember one and live with the other. The n Damascena seeds that show freely in my American backyard are inedible. Seeds from n Sativa (black cumin) were sprinkled across the borek and pide I grew up eating.

The nigella plants used in this print were gathered in my Redwood city backyard and printed with dirt from my current home.

Screenprint, dirt and clear base on paper