Gulay Semercioğlu's signature style involves carefully looping kilometres of thin, coloured, enamel coated, silver wire around a series of small screws that have been precisely laid out across a firm wooden frame. This filament, only slightly thicker than a human hair, is repeatedly interwoven, overlapped and pulled taut to achieve a rigid metallic mesh. By densely overlapping the fine wire, surfaces appear from a distance like shimmering, glossy blocks of smooth colour. While up close the viewer witnesses fluctuating tonal modulations as light is reflected and refracted from one strand to the next.
The layout of the screws around which the wire is woven determines the direction of repeating lines that traverse the picture plane, defining sections and creating motifs. These motifs are based on a range of subjects, yet in each case these subjects are never explicit and only hinted at.
For many years Semercioğlu was a painter and her practice remains indebted to that medium. Her canvases have been replaced with rigid, wooden frames and her paint replaced with carefully spun wire. Her deft manipulation of her signature material creates patterns and textures that mimic an abstract painter's brush strokes and her non-figurative, non-referential, and non-narrative artworks that balance colour, space, shape, and surface are reminiscent of finely executed abstract and colour field paintings, recreating their elegance and hypnotizing effect.
