Dervis Can Vural: Fields, Flows and Fracture

Fire Arts Inc. invites the public to a truly unique exhibit by clay artist Dervis Can Vural. “Fields, Flows and Fracture” will be open from February 14 - March 28, with an opening reception on Saturday, February 14, from 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. He will also be giving a talk on the Second Saturday, March 14, at 2:00 p.m.

Vural’s hand-built forms are models of morphogenesis. He is drawn to the living world because it is an inexhaustible catalog of structure: folds that thicken and buckle, boundaries that branch, surfaces that wrinkle, crack, heal, and remember. “In biology, form is never designed; it is negotiated between growth and constraint. The surface of the clay is a record of such competing tendencies: flow versus fracture, smoothing versus roughening, periodicity and symmetry versus disorder.”

Some of his surfaces are decorated with the chemical logic of reaction–diffusion systems, featuring repeated bands, labyrinths, and cellular partitions. Others echo growth-driven instabilities that occur when a surface layer is forced to accommodate a mismatch underneath: wrinkling, buckling, and desiccation. The forms look simultaneously wounded and healed, tense and resolved, fragile and stable: a quiet statement that resilience is not smooth perfection but irregularity and randomness, tended by survival.

Vural’s color vocabulary stays close to the earth: white clay, brown and red clay, iron-rich slips, elemental oxides, with occasional mineral shifts from firing. By limiting chroma, he lets the geometry and texture carry the meaning: edge conditions, boundary layers, gradients, discontinuities, and the distressed topography that fingers can read easier than the eyes.

Dervis Can Vural is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame. His work can also be viewed on Instagram at @derviscanvural, and Pottery Store: www.patternedmud@etsy.com. Dervis also has a musician profile on Spotify, sptfy.in/8f75, as well as an academic website at https://www3.nd.edu/~dvural.

Fire Arts is located at 305 East Colfax in South Bend, Indiana. The showroom is open to the public on Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:00 - 9:00 p.m., Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 12:00 - 5:00 p.m., and by appointment. Call (574) 282-2787 or check our website at www.fireartsinc.com for more information.