“Ways of building, growing, and cooking become translated in my work into gesture, composition and form,” writes Derya Akay on the acts of curiosity and learning that animate this research residency focused on food and culture.

Akay has been working on proliferating versions of tableware and cooking vessels while living in Kingston for most of fall 2023 as Agnes Stonecroft Artist-in-Residence. Inspired by the book Anatolian Dishes and Turkish Cuisine featuring regional recipes and illustrations of vernacular kitchenware of the early twentieth century, Akay’s bowls, plates and pots have emerged in a diversity of materials. Artwork Becomes Dinner Party, featuring sketches, studies and prototype vessels whose distinctive characteristics are created through crisscrossing traditional and digital media, is on view in Etherington House.

Derya Akay (Turkish, b. 1988) is an interdisciplinary artist who works, learns and gardens on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Akay plays with the tensions between preservation and decay, control and chance, trial and error. Their process-based artistic strategies allow them to embrace the realities of time and transformation. Akay poeticizes the act of cooking, using it as a metaphor for their studio-based practice.

Supported by Stonecroft Foundation for the Arts, Canada Council for the Arts and British Columbia Arts Council.
Derya Akay is represented by Unit 17, Vancouver.