'Shape-shifting magic'

“Lock” (photo), by Ayşe Goloğlu Soyer, M.D., in her show Korondaşlar, at Kingston Gallery, Boston, May 5-30.

Dr. Soyer is a retired neurologist who has never exhibited before.

The gallery says of her:

“Because she grew up immersed in the art world in Turkey, one wouldn’t label her work outsider art, yet she works with a fresh, unselfconscious inventiveness. Her artist statement is a fanciful imagined conversation between the creator and her creations, her Korondaşlar, laden with memories of her WWII childhood in Istanbul. ‘That’s how it was. The war crept on. There were days we went without electricity, water, sometimes food. Not saying I miss that part. What I’m saying is that it led me to the great discovery that not having toys didn’t mean not having anything to play with, why I have no memories of being idle or bored. We had our shapeshifting folded paper boats, our origami salt shakers, cups, magical boxes in different sizes that, when need be, changed into dollhouses and cars, those cast-off buttons that when threaded on string became bracelets, when put against metal became musical instruments. And if our old torn socks were too worn to be unraveled and re-knitted, they were dolls ready to be stuffed and stuffed animals to be made. And we, gathering them up and placing them on the blue plastic muşamba were able to sail them on a baby blanket from the Marmara to the North Sea. The creativity that sprouted within us from the seed of paucity grew into abundance. It didn’t leave time for boredom.’

“The expressive figures populating the center gallery, fashioned during the isolation of the pandemic from cast-off materials scavenged from the streets and her household, and represented in large photographs on the walls of the gallery, share that same shape-shifting magic.’’’