Drawing her inspiration from the Ottoman art of ceramics, tile making, and traditional flower designs, Nermin Kura follows the traces of creativity and techniques of the past, amalgamating them anew through a contemporary understanding of this culture.
Her ceramics, voluminous and enlarged many times beyond their original size, include hybrid forms and products of her imagination and are painted and glazed in plain with vibrant colors, emphasizing the elements of their forms. As a result, Kura creates a language of forms and color, faithful to the symmetry, sexuality and abundance of details found in nature. Art Historian Serpil Bağcı notes, “If you try to perceive these forms in another dimension, you might assume that you are looking through a magnifying glass at the petals of tulips, some of which are upside down. Forms that extend upwards and open up, somehow reach out to you and offer you their content. Nermin Kura deals with the issue of containment in her ceramics. Her forms do not hide their contents; they either show their contents through their opening mouths, or they transform them into another form and extend them, or they reveal them from the side of the bodies, underneath, or in a different color. In this way, flowers and vessels reminiscent of flowers pour out their insides as if they were telling us about themselves, helping us to discover them.”
Nermin Kura graduated from Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV in 1982 with a BA in Art History and an MA in Art History and Archeology. She obtained a DEA in African History from Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne in 1985, a PhD from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Design and Architecture of Bilkent University in 1996 on “Ottoman Influence on Tunisian Mural Tiles of the 16th-17th Centuries”, and an MFA in the field of Ceramic Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. Kura taught Art History at Bilkent University, Ankara, between 1990-1995 and at RISD in the Liberal Arts and Ceramics departments in 1998, where she also was an artist in residence in ceramics. She was a lecturer on ceramics at Bennington College in Vermont in 1997, and at Rhode Island College in 1999. Nermin Kura currently serves as Professor of Art and Architectural History at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, and her work continues to be exhibited internationally, in countries including Turkey, the United States and France.
