Elif Uras: Earth on Their Hands

Earth on Their Hands is Elif Uras’s fourth solo exhibition with the Istanbul-based Galerist. Coinciding with the 18th Istanbul Biennial, the show brings together slip-cast ceramics made in Iznik, the historical heart of Turkish pottery, where Uras often works, and wheel-thrown, hand-built works from her New York studio.

“In Elif Uras’s Earth on Their Hands, the ceramic surface becomes both archive and prophecy: a space where the invisible labour of women, daily, generational, elemental, is reimagined in gold, marked into vessels, plates, and coins, and elevated to a mythology of care, protest, and persistence,” writes curator and critic Naz Cuguoğlu.

The exhibition features a selection of Uras’s distinctive, voluptuous vessels, which are inspired by Neolithic clay figurines that are native to the artist’s hometown. The bulbous forms, which move between the figurative and the abstract are painted with optical patterns drawn from Islamic geometry. Placed on a spiralling wooden platform in the darkened gallery space, the ceramic sculptures, layered with slips, glazes, and gold lustre, are glowing and powerful.

Uras presents a world where ornament is not decoration but data, and gold is not wealth but tribute. The artist transforms gilding—a material historically tied to patriarchal power—into what Cuguoğlu calls “a feminist tactic: to gild the unnoticed, to sanctify the mundane.” Her golden surfaces honour the invisible and unpaid work of women across generations, from the domestic sphere to the fields and workshops of Anatolia.

Works like Craft Palace and Matriarchal Resistance elevate everyday gestures—sweeping, weaving, cooking—into mythic acts of survival. “Woman is not only the pillar of the home, but also of the world,” the 19th-century writer Fatma Aliye once declared; Uras’s sculptures embody this truth in clay and gold. In Matriarchal Resistance, women stand arm-in-arm with trees, echoing real-life environmental protests led by rural women defending their lands from industrial exploitation. These figures are not passive muses but active guardians, their bodies “grounded, elemental, of the earth,” as Cuguoğlu observes.

The exhibition culminates in a spiral of ceramic plates, nearly 200 in total, which are engraved with goddess-like figures and scenes of collective labour. These speculative currencies of care propose a matriarchal economy, one “built not on conquest, but on continuity.” Spirals, suns, and crescent moons recur throughout, symbols of cyclical time and renewal.

Uras, whose works are part of the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the V&A, continues to blur boundaries between art, craft, and social commentary. Earth on Their Hands is not a nostalgic homage but a living archive—one where clay becomes witness, and where history, quite literally, rests in women’s hands.

Earth on Their Hands is on view from September 16 to November 8, 2025.

Elif Uras

Galerist