Each pot takes six to seven hours to make, where she twists the coils into thick ribbons. She begins a new series by drawing the intended forms, although the real form always emerges in the process of construction; clay is alive, she says, and resists its creator. When she moved to Denmark, she realized that the types of bowls she had previously made did not translate well into heat-resistant ceramics. She needed to find shapes that would communicate with the material. The disappearing base of her bowls, by contrast, was something she developed “suddenly, right from the start,” recalling shapes she could recall in “grandmother's casseroles” and Anatolian pots. Making a pot is a constant effort, trying to tame the material while still serving it. The subsequent glazing stage is “the worst part of the job – dirty, terrible.” Developing a single color from minute variations of dozens of ingredients can take up to two years. “Color is a need,” she explained, but it’s also a response to the bowl’s unique shape. After testing colors on tiles and small bowls, she sprays on the glaze using a vacuum hose. Like clay, glazes seem to have a mind of their own and can produce unexpected results: the pistachio green glaze she came up with years ago now produces only a light blue color. The Turkish word for glaze is secretwhich also means “secret”, which suggests the mystery of the chemical process, and also the fact that ceramists do not share their recipes, perfected over many years of trial and error.
Last year's exhibitions took a physical toll on Sisbye: tendonitis in one shoulder, carpal tunnel and a trigger finger in one hand. Sisbye was “scared to death” that she would no longer be able to build pots; her biggest fear in life is not being able to work. Over the summer, she carefully prepared three large bowls to see what would happen. “So far so good. But, of course, after a certain point the body gives up,” she said. “It's very easy for me to accept the physical changes in my body. I'm getting old – what can I do about it? But I'm not getting old.” Indeed, she looks surprisingly young, constantly jumping up from the sofa in high-heeled ankle boots – to find a catalog, adjust the shutters, make tea. At the same time, she admitted, she lives with the consciousness of death, wondering how many years she has left. “I don't want to die. When I fall asleep at night, I think that I could, and my body won't be found for three days if no one comes in.” A little later she added: “But maybe it’s a comfort to think about your death. It’s a comfort to know the truth.”
During our conversations, I became intrigued by the aura of timelessness that Sisbye exudes. Her bowls have a similar effect: clashing timelines; they seem both primitive and modern. Sisbai is tall, with sage-colored eyes and a mop of cropped cinnamon-colored hair. She dresses impressively: once, before we met, I saw her walking down the street and turned around to take another look.
Despite her commanding elegance, she seems on the verge of bursting into laughter at any moment. The same sense of wonder reigns in her home, which at first glance is sparse and extremely aesthetic: two white sofas on either side of a gray coffee table that seems to float above the ground, like her bowls; rugs in cool colors from Siesbye. The studio at the rear is visible from the seating area; the shelves are lined with her pots and glaze samples but otherwise uncluttered. The mezzanine level houses the bedroom, decorated in earthy and sensual red tones. But there's humor hidden in the clean, controlled beauty: stuffed animals stored in a drawer, a photo of a license plate a friend sent her pinned in the hallway with the words “BO KU 7K” written on it. If you say it out loud, in Turkish it means “We are up to our ears in shit.” At the end of our first interview, Sisbye brought me a pear pie from a nearby bakery and then asked if I wanted to hear a dirty joke she had recently been told. She doubled over laughing before she could get to the punch line.
