ArteEast is pleased to present an interview with artist Defne Tutus as part of our Artist Spotlight series.
Defne Tutus is an artist, writer and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. in Art History from Tufts University. She also studied fashion design at FIT, fiber art and metal working at SVA and participated for many semesters in NYC Crit Club. She has shown her work at SVA, Copeland Gallery in London, ABC No Rio, Tussle Magazine Projects and Latchkey Gallery. She has participated in fundraisers for Open Source Gallery, Textile Artists for Movement Voter Project, and Thirst: a fundraiser and art auction in association with No More Deaths.
She is a member of Incredible Incubator, an artists collective born in 2020 with an interest in work which interacts with the surrounding environment in unexpected ways. They present art shows on their website. She is a co-founder of art and literary journal Passing Notes launched in March 2022. Issue 3 is coming out in October 2023. Her curatorial projects include The Bone That Sings Was Mine at ChaShaMa 340 E. 64th st. NYC in July/Aug 2022. Her next curatorial project, Illiquid Objects is a collaboration with fellow artist and curator Yasmeen Abdallah. The show is forthcoming at Studio NineDee in Chelsea in September 2023.















ArteEast: Can you tell us about your work in general and the main themes you return to in your practice?
Defne Tutus: I use the power of ornament to transform familiar materials into protective constructions to guard the body from the dangers and violence of the world. There is ample evidence in many cultures of the human desire to surround oneself with objects in death, both useful and protective, buried alongside the dead in graves. This practice inspires my work. Whether it’s a trinket or an elaborate array of riches, these objects buried with the dead buffet one for the vicissitudes of the afterlife. Combs and adornments are enclosed so the wayfarer feels beautiful. Masks, armor and shields are to guard something human, since flesh needs no protection in death. These regalia are shielding objects; a suit of arms and creature comforts which invoke talismanic protection. The intricacy and care with which these objects are appointed to their celestial task speaks to an expansive idea of what it means to be human.
AE: You have been drawing since you were young, but started getting serious about your work in a fine arts context once you began making work in fiber. How did you arrive at textiles as a material that could channel and translate your creative practice?
DT: Each of us are calyces of immeasurable depth and unconscious yearnings, unknowable even to ourselves, most of the time. I have no idea what drew me to textiles. On the one hand, it is obvious; cloth is always present in our lives from the beginning, for all of us. In another way, the interest I have is deep and unending and I have no reason why the strong affinity is there. I do not belong to a family with a particular heritage of textile craft. In fact, craft, sewing and making things with my hands were all discouraged by my science and technology enthralled immigrant parents. I remember wondering how to make a daisy chain that I had read about in a book, a simple and alluring object for me, but I didn’t know whom to ask. It seemed the days of lolling on a field and braiding flower stems together were gone.
I discovered in textiles a useful technology and an aquifer of knowledge. Once I figured out how to make a few simple things, my confidence grew and my ideas grew with it. Artists dive into depths and mine for a scrap of knowledge, mull it over, mold it into a model and bring it up to the surface in shimmering form where everyone else can see it. Something lost or vague becomes real and able to be visualized.
We are all swaddled in fabric from the moment we’re born and that intimate closeness and dependence throughout our lives probably inures us to its magic, power and beauty. Cloth is always the closest thing to our bodies and it is the most personal and intimate of all human made creations and arts. We even carry the metaphor of our daily experience with thread and fabric into almost every other area of our lives; from psychology, to writing, to politics, to physics. Memories are woven together, communities are close-knit, individuals are brought into the fold, thoughts are stitched together, time unfurls and stretches before us. This familiarity and ubiquity of cloth in our understanding of the world gives textiles a unique ability to activate untapped layers of memory and emotion as well as to communicate deeply meaningful knowledge of ourselves, our connections to each other and ultimately our place in the world.
tapestry of stars
fabric of society
web of lies
story full of holes
cut from the same cloth
knit together
..as lovers tie the knot
James Laver, longtime Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the V&A and a consummate believer in ‘Clothes as Spiritual Things’ put it well when he wrote in 1949:
“Yes, the Universe itself, with Time and Space for its warp and woof, is nothing but a garment which makes the Invisible visible.”
AE: Your work is defined by both your materials, but also the techniques with which you employ your materials. Tell us about this intersection of material and technique in your work. What is your process of discovering new materials and learning new techniques?
DT: I am a lifelong flea market frequenter. Nowadays I mostly shuffle and organize what I have accumulated over the years, but my collection of string, beads and rocks is something to behold. Most of it was found for pennies!
A love of things is problematic in this age where the oceans are heaving with our plastics and trash. It can be overwhelming to be alive right now. Of course I have a lot of guilt about my accumulation of stuff. But I try to make something beautiful with the forgotten or overlooked.. I love mixing fiber, beads, rocks, metal, plastic and hair together through textile making techniques. I live for learning new techniques – this basically entails visual research and attempts to make new versions of what I see. I strive for the dainty, the delicate, the frivolous, the ornamental, the extraneous, and ultimately the handmade magic that no machine can copy. If a person wanted to copy me, I welcome it. I love when someone appreciates the difficulty of handiwork and the problems that arise. And my admiration for another artist grows when they try something I tried and they succeed due to inner drive, patience, dexterity and vision. With textiles, no handmade works can ever really look the same. Your touch embeds you in the fibers.
AE: Tell us about your research into the history of witches and the historic femicides that took place in Europe for a hundred years. How did you bring these elements and influences within your different works?
DT: Women congregating and assembling, or consolidating knowledge and power has always made patriarchal society apprehensive. I refer in my work to the anxiety and paranoia in the male artistic imagination about women convening in the woods, far from the cloistered life inside the home and bordering dangerously close to the world of sorcery and covens. After admiring Jennifer Coates’ compositions of groups of women congregating mysteriously in nature and reading her essay The Mute Shape of Exteriority, I’m fascinated by Paul Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon, the paintings of Paul Sérusier like Breton Women, The Meeting in the Sacred Grove, Paul Ranson’s witches swaying around bonfires in vivid red hallucinatory dreamscapes and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s deeply unnerving short story Young Goodman Brown. I’m continually inspired by the writing of women like Silvia Federici, bell hooks, Audre Lorde and recently, Anne Carson.
AE: Your recent works are centered around textiles that mimic animal skins. What is this new work rooted in and in what ways have you seen your work evolve from these influences?
DT: I’ve had this phrase running through my mind lately: I think I’m becoming obsolete. It’s not that I’m already there, but I’m on my way there. Eventually, I will become ancient. We all will. Maybe I don’t fear it. It’s actually calming to finally accept it. Why shouldn’t I become obsolete? Everything I grew up with has changed. The things we collected, the ways we entered culture, the time period of attention we were expected to maintain, the arrogance and obliviousness of our youth to assume things would remain much the same, indefinitely. It is the way of the world that all the knowledge and cultural capital I assiduously sought and accrued is obsolete. It is imperative that I accept this and seek more.
I’ve been reading a lot about cultivating a worldview which includes valuing nature, plants and animals. I think in billions of years mycelium and fungi and bacteria will take over the earth. In the meantime, I feel closer to animals than fungi or microorganisms, so I want to make things for animals. Maybe in a few million years the fungi will break down the hair fibers, metals and plastics in our objects. In the meantime, handmade “skins” are where I’m starting.
AE: What and who are some of your major creative influences, and why?
DT: I am so motivated by going to see textile art in the studios of my artist friends and in galleries/museums. I like to see up close what artists are doing with their materials, how they’re making it sing. Dramatically, textiles fold, smush, unfurl, flow, drape, ripple and float. They’re very performative objects and they lure me in.
I admire the stuffed fabric fetishes of Dorothea Tanning which I’ve never seen in person but guard them in my screenshots like amulets. I hope spiritual osmosis happens.
Veronica Ryan’s works impress the drama of gargantuan scale (her fruit sculptures in Hackney) and I also feel a connection through the intimacy of small sewn or hand knit objects.
Suzanne Jackson’s ethereal works, possessing an almost gaseous or liquid quality of fluid colors, textures and transparencies inspires me so much.
Rosemary Mayer commands the dramatic power of drapery, the uniquely magnificent things it can do and bring to a space when it escapes its duties and stands on its own.
June Crespo’s work is where I can see what happens when practice and experience are cultivated and unleashed. The result is dramatic, fluid, elegant shapes inscribed with hours and years of labor, resulting in moments of virtuosity and magical forms.
Yasmeen Abdallah, an artist who continually surprises me with an infinite capacity to create divine reliquaries of the self embedded with traces of her days. Her work is like lace woven from detritus; anointed by her careful stitches, her memories and made somehow luxurious.
Aruni Dharmakirthi’s commitment to the act of stitching memory and the magnetic pull of the stories she imagines into being move me.
Seeing an installation of works by Ektor Garcia is like an overflowing feast for my eyes and senses. Technique after technique, mastered and subverted, then layered like an orchestral composition into a particular setting.
AE: What are you currently working on and do you have any shows or projects upcoming in 2023-2024?
DT: I’m a co-founder of art and literary journal Passing Notes launched in March 2022. Issue 3 is coming out in October 2023. Follow us: @_passingnotes
My next curatorial project, Illiquid Objects, is a collaboration with fellow artist and curator Yasmeen Abdallah. The group show celebrating phenomenal artists working in textile and sculpture is forthcoming at Studio NineDee in Chelsea in September 2023. Follow the gallery: @studioninedee
— Interview by Lila Nazemian
DEFNE TUTUS ONLINE:
Website: mirabile-visu.com
Instagram: @defne.tutus