“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. Starting seedlings of heirloom Anatolian pepper varieties, version-ing clay vessel forms and working out new communal meal practices: these are a few of Akay’s inventive blends of Turkish cultural traditions and sustainable food ecologies.

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 tension 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 with the organic materials they work with. Akay poeticizes the act of cooking, using it as a metaphor for their studio-based practice.

Curated by Sunny Kerr, Curator of Contemporary Art

Hero image: Derya Akay, 2023, computer-rendered vessel studies. Courtesy of the artist