Lara Karadogan (b. 2000, California USA) is a multimedia artist, specializing in painting on clay. Below is our conversation in her studio.
AKZ Can you walk me through your day? When you get to the studio, how do you set up and start?
LK I am usually working on one painting at a time, but I have a daily practice of making a small tile every day as a way of recording and metabolizing an image I’ve come across. So I’ll write or draw or carve what I want to see.
AKZ Oh that’s awesome. Do you bring the image into the studio or rely on memory?
LK It’s not so direct. Sometimes an idea is immediate and fast, but most of the time, what I make is an accumulated argument in response to what I’m thinking about.
AKZ Do your drawings correspond specifically to a painting?
LK Starts with drawing for sure.
AKZ When did you start to incorporate clay into your practice?
LK I first used clay 5 years ago. But clay itself is one of the first surfaces that recorded early language and cultural exchanges, with symbols, hashes, cuneiform, and trades being pressed into wet clay or etched into stone. It’s like an ancient hard drive of coded communication. I see my paintings as translation tablets across my Turkish, Spanish, and English languages, an archive of evolving symbols.
AKZ What’s the relationship between the painted and the carved surface?
LK Once the clay dries, it’s set. The image has been excavated. I think of the painting as meeting the excavated image. Sometimes the two layers render and enforce each other, but I like moments of disagreement or misalignment as well.
AKZ And are they ever in conflict with one another?
LK Because I work with unfired clay, each piece will eventually crack in response to the temperature and humidity of its environment, making each painting an event with a lifecycle of its own. I like that the final outcome is independent of viewership and independent of who made it. Whether it’s a solid crack down the center or a diagonal split, it’s as though the painting decides which aspects of its surface it agrees with.
AKZ Aside from the natural environment, does your cultural or social environment also feed into the work?
LK Yes. Going into each painting, I’ll choose a set of words in Spanish, Turkish, and English that each has the same string of letters I call a base-pair. This base-pair spells a word that is part of the three larger words, acting as the connective tissue across these languages.
For example, A - N - D brings forward “command” in English, “andalucía” in Spanish, and then “vatandaş” in Turkish. By thinking of the images evoked by each word, I’ll start each painting. How can otherwise random and unlinked verbal words transform cohesively onto a physical surface? What does a word and its image counterpart tell you about the cultural infrastructure it’s born out of?
AKZ Do you always choose the letters and words at random?
LK I look for base-pairs whose meaning itself is charged and positioned. Other examples are “me” which elicits “game” in English, “esmeralda” (green) in Spanish, and “mercimek corba” in Turkish (lentil soup). Another past example is “or” which brings forward “information” in English, “hormiga” in Spanish (ant), and “orman” in Turkish (forest).
Unlinked and otherwise random images are introduced to each other visually, breaching across linguistic barriers.
AKZ Does reflecting on these works then feed back into your relationship with those cultures?
LK While each language and therefore culture can feel pretty separate on their own, I across their overlap with a lot of natural familiarity. So while it’s an entrance into research and history, the three are forged together through memory.
AKZ Speaking of symbols, when did the circle start coming into your work?
LK There are a lot of circles. It started when I separated a Venn diagram of 3 circles into an ellipsis sign with 3 dots. Then I made the ellipsis piece that has three spheres with symbols punched out. A plus sign on the left sphere, an arrow pointing right in the middle sphere, and a minus sign on the last sphere. They are angled so that light can cast through these holes, reflecting each symbol onto the rest of the painting as pure light. So each day passes, light shines across the painting and casts the images onto its surface. Similar to the cracking clay, it’s an event that happens independently of being seen.
AKZ It feels like this tension between conflict and coexistence. I don't even know if that's a question. Maybe more of an observation. But is there a question or conflict you are trying to resolve?
LK I love how you said that, I hadn’t thought about it like that. There’s forced coexistence. These images are introduced to one another in a way that they wouldn't have met out in the world. But I think there is a game element to each painting, where there’s an embedded path or circuit to each piece. The colors also sometimes seem electric on an old medium, charging the circulation of each image.
AKZ Can you speak more about the clay’s inherent qualities and how that feeds into the work?
LK I am still learning from clay, and there are outcomes specific to the material, such as the range of colors that happen when playing with the pressure and dry time. I used this effect with this piece, Tavla. I set up a game of backgammon on the wet clay surface, so the circles on it are the marks from the real game pieces. I recorded where and who rolled each number. But all the clay tones are natural to the clay, real markers of movement with the game pieces adding pressure and creating lighter circles. Seeing the clay as another way for the paintings to be events in themselves, markers of interaction with some outcomes left to chance.
I am working on a series of paintings that are each backgammon games, making each painting the residue of the game and strategy.
AKZ Do the explorations from the daily tiles go into a painting?
LK I am not sure. I feel like I haven’t found out how to assemble them. After each is painted, I think there needs to be a larger image they connect to, but I need to think on what that is.
AKZ What do you hope an audience takes away from the work?
LK One thing I've realized is that when someone is looking at the work, they are not going to read the base-pair logic system I’ve set up. It’s a method that makes painting generative for me, with meaning embedded into the piece itself. They are decoys in a way, presenting one image but holding a separate, unseen argument.
