A wheel turning slowly in the studio, plates left out to dry, and figures carrying stories across the surface of the clay. The most familiar scenes of everyday life take on a different meaning here. We meet Elif Uras, who moved from a background in law and economics to carve out her own space between ceramics, painting, and drawing, on the threshold of a conversation weaving together domestic spaces, vessels, and women’s labor. Memories gathered around a table sit side by side with motifs carried from past to present; we speak about how the invisible is made visible.
After studying at Brown University and Columbia Law School, you pursued Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. How does this multilayered education across law, economics, and visual arts shape your practice today?
I was always drawn to art, so choosing this path felt very natural to me. I began my formal art education in my twenties. My background in law has indirectly influenced the way I think about the systems, structures, and power relations that organize the world.
My interest in questions of value, craft practices, and especially women’s labor can also be traced to my training in economics.
You work across ceramics, painting, and drawing. How does the relationship between these mediums shape your production process?
A major shift in my practice happened when I began painting on ceramic surfaces instead of canvas. It meant moving from a two-dimensional plane toward a more volumetric way of thinking. Suddenly, a completely new horizon opened up, and I was able to position my work between sculpture and painting.
Working with ceramics allows me to think about surface, volume, and the body simultaneously.
In Sultana’s Table, traditional Turkish cuisine and table culture become an important narrative space. What does the table represent for you in terms of social memory and women’s labor?
The table is both extremely everyday and deeply political. On one hand, it is a stage where domestic labor largely remains invisible; on the other, it is where cultural memory is transmitted across generations. Recipes, cooking methods, table settings, and utensils all carry tangible traces of this transmission.
So the table is not merely a place where food is consumed — it is where class, gender, representation, and belonging intersect.
In Sultana’s Table, I wanted to reimagine this space as one of solidarity and collective production: women gathered around a table where making and sharing come forward. The title references Cihat Burak’s 1984 painting Sultan Sofrası. His satirical and politically charged approach inspired both this work and a painting on canvas I made in 2016. The reference offers both homage to tradition and a proposal for rereading it.
Female figures frequently appear in your works, strongly connected to invisible fields of everyday labor. What kind of narrative language do you adopt when constructing these figures?
The scenes I depict usually come from everyday life: women cooking in the kitchen, cleaning at home, producing together in factories or workshops, bathing in hammams, shopping at markets, even resisting in forests.
These compositions are not decorated or idealized scenes. They are fragments of lived reality, presented without embellishment — subjects art history has rarely been interested in. Making this overlooked and often uncompensated labor visible, and building narratives around these women and these moments, is very important to me.
Ottoman tile tradition, especially İznik ceramics, appears in your work through a contemporary interpretation. What does re-engaging historical craft forms in today’s visual language mean to you?
I began working with ceramics in İznik, so this historical and visual heritage naturally became part of my practice. Over time, I internalized and reinterpreted motifs from art history that resonated with me, gradually developing my own visual vocabulary.
I try to construct my own iconography by combining this tradition with representations of female forms that never existed within it.
Prehistoric female figures from this geography are also very influential for me — not only aesthetically, but because they are among the earliest ceramic sculptures in human history. I hold onto these references and value them both as sources of feminine archetypes and my connection to the memory of ceramics.
Your style brings together Western modernism and Eastern ornamental traditions. How does this relate to cultural identity and hybridity?
The ornamental elements present in our ceramic tradition and the geometry at the core of Islamic art deeply interest me. At the same time, my understanding of composition and figuration is connected to the legacy of Western modernism.
Rather than constructing a hierarchical opposition between the two, I try to create a transitional, permeable space between them.
Your ceramic works oscillate between everyday functional objects and sculptural forms. How does this duality affect the relationship you want to establish with the viewer?
Throughout history, ceramics has been a functional material — vessels, amphorae, plates. It belongs to everyday life beyond the traditional categories of painting or sculpture. Even within contemporary art, ceramics still remembers and reminds us of this identity.
In my work, forms sometimes evoke functional objects while simultaneously asserting themselves as sculptural bodies. They are all a kind of “vessel,” yet the narratives carried on their surfaces transform them.
Besides sculptures, I produce tablets, plates, vessels, and in my last solo exhibition, “coins” —I paint on hardened clay surfaces instead of canvas. I also like positioning these works along a chronological line extending from archaeological artifacts such as ancient coins, tablets, and pottery. I enjoy the way ceramics’ historical and everyday identity seeps into the works.
What kind of intellectual space do you hope your works open regarding womanhood, representation, and labor?
For me, this is not only an aesthetic or representational issue but also one of awareness and responsibility. In Turkey, registered women’s employment is around 30%, while men’s employment is more than double — yet statistics still fail to explain everything, because women constantly work both at home and in public, often unpaid. This invisibility is reproduced in cultural narratives.
At the same time, policies and discourses that disregard equality, rights, and justice further complicate women’s lives. I hope viewers look again at seemingly ordinary spaces: the kitchen, workshop, marketplace, or women gathered around a table. These scenes carry both aesthetic and political intensity and pose some questions:
What kind of labor is worthy of visibility, and what is devalued? Which stories are told, and which remain untold?