Istanbul and Constantinople:
Echoes Through Time
This project was a return to a city that was never simply one city. Istanbul and Constantinople became a way of working through memory, inheritance, fracture and repair.
In August 2024 I travelled to Istanbul as part of an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project. The journey followed family memory, but it also moved beyond family. It became a study of place, faith, minority survival, visual traces, and the fragile possibility of reconciliation.
My father was born in Istanbul in 1911 and left as a child after the upheavals that reshaped the lives of Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Turkish communities across the region. The project did not set out to turn that history into grievance. It set out to look carefully at what remains when official histories simplify, rename or erase.
The resulting works combine drawing, printmaking, 3D modelling, laser cutting, relief, votive forms and digital processes. The materials matter because the subject matter is not only narrative. It is tactile: weight, surface, fragment, relic, sign, light.
The central question
What can be carried forward without falsifying the past?
The work asks how memory can be held with care: not as nostalgia, not as accusation, but as a living responsibility.
What the project explored
Five linked strands shaped the work.
Family memory
The project began with inherited fragments: stories, absences, names, places and the unresolved presence of a father’s lost city.
Minority histories
Istanbul’s Greek, Armenian, Jewish and other communities offered a more complex picture than the simplified national narratives that often replace them.
Sacred and secular traces
Churches, icons, talismans, votive objects and fragments of ornament became sources for new forms of making.
Reconciliation
The project resisted easy consolation. Its hope lies in attention, in the possibility that careful looking can open a less hostile future.
Works and outcomes
A sequence of works made from travel, memory, sacred sites, minority histories and reconstructed fragments.
Ascent and Descent
A relief in which the saint, the city, the hill and the sea are held together as one field of memory.
Chalcedon
A head, a tower and a shore: a work about crossing, naming and the older layers of the city.
Holding Icon
A maternal image treated not as reproduction, but as a carried inheritance.
Talisman
Protection, ornament and memory gathered into a small circular form.
Lavaron
A standard-like object, caught between emblem, relic and procession.
Complex
The city and the self as layered relief: faces, architecture and broken historical surfaces pressing into one another.
Sacred architecture
A surface built from threshold, ornament and chamber: sacred language translated into relief.
Making Sense
The works gathered together as a field of related signs, each fragment testing what the project had become.
The printing plates
The project returns to print: carving, pressure and reversal as methods of thinking through history.
Continuing forms
The project opened into later sculptural and votive languages.
After the journey
The DYCP project did not end with travel. It opened a longer body of work concerned with vessels, reliquaries, votives, traces and the question of what is worth passing on.
Later works developed this language further: boxes, small houses, protective chambers, faces, saints, fragments, and secular relics. The Istanbul project became one of the roots of that wider stream.
Its continuing importance lies in the way it connects lived experience, inherited displacement, craft, technology and historical responsibility. The work is not an attempt to recover the past whole. It is an attempt to hold the fragments honestly.
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